Colors of War
by Akishira
Summary: Under hiatus, I KNOW... The Turks should have paid more attention to the agenda before agreeing to work under Shinra... and now it's up to them to win the Wutai war.
1. Genesis

Colors of War, Chapter 1: In the Beginning

            This day, rearing high above the Mithril Mountains, was like every other day that passed in the region. The sun was shining, refracting light into the clouded depths of the mines, and the sound of expensive loafers coming down the winding tunnels was a bare clicking under the whistle of eager wind.

Well, so maybe the loafers were out of place. But then, the motley Turks were out of place in almost everywhere that existed on the Planet. Everywhere, that was, except among their grounds and offices. Still, here they were, three of them in varying outfits, striding down the earthen tunnels as if they belonged there, not the occasional wide-eyed miner who gawked at their passing. Not that there were many of them. For today, the bulk of the Mithril Miners had been persuaded to take their business elsewhere.

The Turks, as the recently coined saying went, were out on business.

--

 For today it was innocent enough, though things could readily change. Iridalan Blackthorne idly toyed with the lay of his lapel, thinking with a frown about what could so easily go wrong. This tip-off had been anonymous but significant, news of a weapon under development which could ignite all the political unrest that the Turks profited from. Likewise, if that weapon was ever completed and used against the Turks... foresight was the most prudent option.

Nobody who looked at the three Turks could have picked out their leader from looks alone, for all of them had the proud, confident carriage of upperclassmen. The only thing that separated Iridalan as the de facto leader was the glimmer of iridescent metal at his left ear, a small clasp of titanium that neither of his other two companions shared. Other than that, all about the same middle age and geared in casual formal, Vincent Valentine and Lancir V2 were equal in authority. One dark and the other scarlet, they matched each other in looks if not personality.

Lancir frowned suddenly, looking around as if tugged by invisible strings. He halted, and the others were halfway down the tunnelway before Vincent turned back, scowling in annoyance. "What's your problem?" he called back with the exasperated air of a nursemaid, striding to his partner's side. "The meeting place isn't that far off." Taking hold of the back of Lancir's trenchcoat, he began to drag the redhead towards their leader, who was looking upon their antics with indulgent irritation that his little soliloquy had been interrupted.

"I'm not _tired_," Lancir protested, trying vainly to pry his trenchcoat from Vincent's firm hold. "I'm not tired, just... I've been hearing something ever since-"

A thin, unhappy wail ghosted down the tunnel they had just turned into, indistinct but undeniable. Iridalan's eyes narrowed; Lancir gave a shout of aggrieved triumph and would have attempted to rush off after it if Vincent had not closed his other hand upon his partner's trailing ponytail. This was also part of Vincent's job, actually; Lancir had a blind spot for children a mile wide, a lethal liability when cold-bloodedness was called for. Vincent was responsible for reining him in appropriately. "Let me go! You heard it, didn't you? Come on-"

Vincent gave the length of hair a firm yank. "Quiet! Don't you smell danger?"

"I smell blood," Iridalan murmured, and set off at a run, drawing his revolver from an inside pocket. Startled at his leader's sudden decision, Vincent released the ponytail, and his partner shot off after their boss, followed closely by a suddenly disturbed gunman.

Had something gone wrong already?

--

"There's your informant," Vincent muttered disgustedly, putting up his Quicksilver. The cave of meeting stank like the worst mating of a slaughterhouse and a severely unhygienic plumbing breach. Their supposed informant was now obviously unable to inform anyone of anything other than that someone didn't want news of the 'weapon' to get out.

Iridalan studied the carnage with distant coldness, noting the minutiae of this scene. "Long sprays of blood. Body parts still intact, or all there anyway." He traced the scattered limbs with a critical eye, scowling. "Looks like an animal did this, but no animal hunts without intent to feed. Too big for an animal anyway. On the other hand, though, no human can rip things apart like paper tissue."

Vincent looked at his bossed thoughtfully. "The 'weapon'...?"

"Boss, can I keep the baby?" Lancir said plaintively, straightening. He held a bundle of red, bawling flesh, which was stubbornly resisting all attempts to wipe it down with a grimy kerchief. "Please?" His partner scowled deeply and started to say something acidic, but Iridalan beat him to it.

"I've said it before and I'll say it again, Lance. No, you can't keep it. It's going to the local orphanage." Lancir's mouth tightened sharply at the statement. He knew very well what was the usual fate of orphanage children, having been one himself. If they weren't sold into indentured servitude, they were sold into prostitution. Lancir had been lucky. The death of his master had dropped him onto the dank streets where the Turks did most of their recruiting. But for every lucky break there were hundreds of slaves that had no hope of release.

"Sir," the redhead said quietly, uncharacteristically serious, "I've never asked you for a favor before, but I'm doing it now. It's already lost its-" he glanced at the dismembered corpse- "its father. If that was its father. I won't knowingly send it to its fate."

Again Vincent opened his mouth to speak, hopelessly, but he closed it again. He knew they couldn't take the child, but he also knew that Lancir wouldn't let things go that easily. Vincent's only role in this was of a bystander. Neither leader nor partner was likely to welcome his input.

Iridalan stared at his Turk, then, since it defied overlooking, at the scattered body parts that painted most of the cavelet. "You do realize that there's only one way to keep it," he said slowly.

Lancir went pale. Chalky, even. He steel his mouth and nodded, though it was plain what Iridalan intended to do. There was only one way in and out of the Turks- the death, or sacrifice, of something. This baby's 'father' had unwittingly paid the price for its stained future. But at least... at least-"You know what to do," the redhead said grimly, wrapping it in his light woolen scarf. Its screams of outrage had dwindled to quiet, exhausted whines, and it curled chubby stick arms to itself in some unconscious quest for comfort. Gently the Turk cradled it into the bend of his arm, hushing it as a mother would, before raising his gaze to Iridalan's impassive grey one. "Can I keep it... her... then?"

Sourly, the leader grinned. "No."

"No? -then what-"

"Vincent will raise her. I'll adopt her formally." A raised hand forestalled Lancir's injured protests. "You're a sucker for babies, redhead, and you'd spoil her for good work. Turks are not pampered people. I'm sure you know all about it."

"But-" both partners said at once, and Vincent continued indignantly, "I hate kids! This isn't just training, Blackthorne, it's bringing it up from scratch- look at it! It's just newly birthed, and what was this guy doing with it in here anyway? I can't train a baby-"

Iridalan's smile was little more than a snarl. "Do you have any objections to my orders, Mr Vincent Valentine?"

Lancir pinched his partner's arm sharply before Vincent could dig himself any deeper. "No sir, of course not."

But inwardly Vincent seethed. His resentment found its target in the oblivious baby, his new charge.

/You want a Turk? Fine. I'll show you what kind of mistake you made./

--

"Sir, we've found something in the excavation site!"

Lenny Pierce was especially grateful for this distraction from his reports. The bureaucracy had been hinting that his project was facing the axe, since it had been running for several months with little more than scattered shells and bits of broken crystal to show for it. If it was axed now, he would be minus a job. Grabbing gloves and a hiking kit from the heap beside his work table, Pierce hurried after the flunky, asking tersely the details of this newest discovery.

No, they had not personally found anything, but one of the diggers had fallen into a deep crevasse covered by a thin shell of soil; there might be some underground dwelling, consistent with the living seclusion of the known Ancients. Mister Pierce was the authority on site, so they had come to him for instructions.

Perhaps if he had not been so desperate for something, anything, Pierce could have known caution. He would have known that the news was fishy- he was not the _authority_ on site, just the _archaeologist_ on site. But he needed an escape, and swung down into the rift with hardly more than a second thought. After that there was no more thought, and no more inclination for thought.

He saw the huge, blue-skinned woman sealed into solid rock, slightly taller than two and a half meters, more clearly than by the light of a single lamp. The lamp was out anyway, cast carelessly to the side where it illuminated the body of the hapless forerunner instead. Either of them was beyond caring. Pierce, or the thing that had once been Pierce, went to the base of the woman and began to dig at the rock with hands that blistered quickly. He might have dug alone forever, but others came, and they dug, and the woman smiled.

Things were looking up for the Starsnuffer.

--

Blanket disclaimer: I don't own anything, Squaresoft does, and if I owned it I'd do my best to own Squaresoft too. Ah, well. I wouldn't turn down a Red plushie.

Author's notes: Yup, it changed again, hopefully for the last time. Seems to be flowing all right, but all the reviewers out there will probably tell me otherwise... Tell me if I start coming up with a Mary Sue, ok? (Second A/N: Changed the formatting slightly to include italics. Now THAT looks good.)


	2. Exodia

Colors of War, Chapter 2: Journey

        La Contresiera was the cradle of modern civilization, and like all growing things, modern civilization had outgrown this cradle. Now it was little more than a mire of grames and darkness, wellspring of all the debauchery that those same civilizations now despised. There were the Turks, of course; can't forget the Turks. People were of mixed feelings about the Turks. Less than thirty years around and they were already known as murderers, hired espionage and- less often- as wild cards. Only the Turks knew why the Turks helped or harmed.

        With Shinra, though, there was only one motivation: money. For an weapons company, Shinra had interests that had nothing to do with weaponry. They supplied guns and other mechanical weaponry to the Eastern Continents, and used those profits to pursue their investments in pharmaceutical and biological advancements. Created hand in hand with the Turks, Shinra was irrefutably ambitious. Because of this- the potential to change much- each Turk leader (Iridalan was the fifth of his succession) kept close tabs on their sister company. 

            George Shinra, the original sire of the company, made most of the formal decisions, but it was his younger brother- Frank Shinra- who did things with their cash. Cavall Turk, the original Turk, hadn't been worried about George. The man was so innocent, he was a liability to himself. No, Frank was the one to watch. He hadn't made any move against his brother in thirty years, but he was leeching the control away. It was only a matter of time.

--

        Little Diera Raistlorne grew up as most children do, and looked quite normal but for a pair of electric purple eyes. Her numerous 'uncles' and 'aunties' generally put it down to a recessive gene, most of them having been single all their lives, and totally unacquainted with normal infants. Lancir was one of the few who were familiar with what children should be, but he liked her eyes. Besides, he wasn't allowed more than half an hour a day with her. Iridalan didn't trust him in this. Vincent, on the other hands, saw more of her than was good for the health of mentor and charge.

        She broke her first bone when she was three, and killed her first target at four. In all fairness, it hadn't been anyone's fault. Vincent couldn't be spared from active duty, and a blade is as deadly in the hands of a child as it is in the hands of a swordsman. The shattered arm, though- that was all Vincent. He didn't like her, he resented her position, and she resented him back with the passion of a child. She stopped her childish habits, refused to cry, and exchanged her emotions for a mask of smile.

        That last exchange worried Lancir, but he dismissed it as 'learning the ropes early'. At least if she could master emotional detachment, it would save her plenty of pain afterwards. Vincent noticed both the change in his pupil and his partner's attitude, but he was not so kindly disposed toward Diera that he bothered himself about her problems. Diera grew away from him in time, coming to rely on others for information. Certainly her mentor gave her no more than he deemed necessary, and Iridalan let him do what he would, trusting in his lieutenant's judgment.

--

        When news of Shinra's latest 'Ancient' toy reached Turk ears, Diera had just been installed in her new 'family'. News of their developments in an alternative energy source was public when she was nursing the broken appendage, and requests for 'Mako Enhancement' volunteer specimens were winded among the Turks when she recorded her seventh anniversary. Shinra had discovered the effects of its alternative energy source now, and the potential was infinite. Here at last they had found the catalyst for a meteoric rise.

        Few were willing to risk unknown side effects, however. Shinra had not mentioned the 'little side effects' that a little hacking easily revealed. Mutations, mainly; mutations which had nothing to do with enhancement. The Turks didn't trust their sister company not to do weird things with their bodies.

        But they did trust the man heading the Enhancement Program. Doctor Howard Gast, was a prominent researcher, a genuinely kind sort of person who would have been a philanthropist if he'd had the money. He was the kind of man who distributed free samples of pharmaceutical good to the poor out of pity, who conducted his business with all the integrity what could be desired of an honest Mideelan. If he was in charge, then the risks were reduced, but still not zero percent. Volunteers were not forthcoming.

        Finally, Vincent suggested letting Diera play litmus tester. Nobody had any real objections, or at least nobody voiced their objections. Lancir's unhappiness was obvious, but Iridalan would not hear of his protecting the proclaimed specimen, and he was too far from his partner's affections to influence Vincent in any useful way. Nobody liked to interfere in what was obviously a personal affair, especially when the general consensus was that Vincent was doing the logical thing. So Diera was duly taken to the laboratories, trailing gloomily behind the person she (as it happened) hated most in the world.

--

        Gast himself wasn't there, but an assistant calmly sprayed a disgruntled Diera in the face with some glowing neon goo and drenched her with a handy bucket. She responded by slamming her heel into his shin hard enough to snap the bone. While he collapsed and howled with pain, the indignant girl made good her escape. It was two days before Vincent dragged her back into her room for an enforced sabbatical (read: isolation), and even in that brief period, some changes had already occurred. Her speed was greater now, just a dodge ahead of full running speed all the time, and the kick that had connected with his chest, among other blows, had produced an impressive fractured rib. Being sprayed in the face had not improved Diera's temper at all.

        "She doesn't need enhancement, she's already a monster!" he muttered darkly as Lancir taped his rib, tactfully not saying 'I told you so'. "I don't deny the treatment works... but if all their products turn out that way, nobody would take orders..."

        Lancir gave him a look full of flat outrage. "How happy would you have been, being sprayed in the face? I told you the process was questionable! So just shut up and think for once!" Throwing the roll of tape angrily back into the first aid kit, the redhead grabbed it and stalked out, leaving Vincent to stare after Lancir's retreating back and fume.

--

        Diera, in the meantime, was annoyed both at herself and everyone in general. Regardless of what was in that icky green goo, it _burned_. Vincent, that old stiff, had obviously neglected to tell her all about it. He hadn't even put her through the shower before locking her in this room, which lacked a bath. She made do with a ripped corner of her shirt and condensation from the cooler vent, swabbing furiously at the itching blisters. They burst and bled, but they also healed fast, and she didn't care why they healed as long as they stopped itching. They never quite did. She kept scratching. It had to stop eventually.

        It hadn't been like this at first. The skin had just felt dry but not this itchy, and the red spots hadn't come up until shortly before Vincent trapped her. It had still been possible to melt into the streets of Nibelheim, even filch food from the inn kitchens. Now she was hungry, and the blisters itched.

        She was scrubbing furiously at a particularly rampant lesion when someone knocked on her door. "It's LOCKED," Diera shrieked angrily at the offending visitor, itchy and frustrated. "Go AWAY!"

        It rattled briefly and, to her startlement, the door creaked apologetically open. "It's me, princess," Lancir said, peering around the shelter of the door as if he expected her to pounce on him any instant. "I thought Vincent might have left you without food. Are you- good gods!" Snatching at her wrists, he stared at her face, horrified. "No wonder he shut you in!" Come on- we're going to the medics."

        Her protest was halfhearted. She wanted to have a shower first, but maybe stopping the itch first was a better prospect. So again she followed an adult into a place of whitecoats, submitted to be exclaimed over, and various arcane potions applied to her itchy skin. Thankfully, both itchiness and blistering subsided in about half a day, though she was banned from her long-awaited bath until the side effects subsided, for fear of contagion. Lancir got cereal and milk for her, ignoring the time limit for once.

        Iridalan himself, after receiving several outraged complaints from his medical department, left his other lieutenant alone. Diera had not been more than a simple experiment to him, but the enhancement made her suddenly an object of interest. Lancir running nursemaid duty was a cheap sacrifice... besides, it was amusing to seem the serene redhead so flustered.

--

        Vincent's rib healed duly, and Diera's martial instruction returned to him, but she was always everywhere else outside her daily brawls with her tall, dark mentor. They were even less of friends now that Vincent's skills were tested on her account, and she seemed to hold her suffering against him. Every time they met for so-called 'lessons', it was less an instruction than an out-and-out catfight. With the enhancements, it was a more even match; Vincent, to his great chagrin, was now not her definite superior but her equal. Mako had given her what time withheld.

        But he could still wipe the floor with her if he wanted to, and Diera knew it. She kept her revenges petty- soaked mattresses, junk mail, harmless annoyances. Strength was a bulwark she gave him no reason to test. Let others like her, even knowing what lay beneath her innocent face. Vincent could only ever be an enemy.

        That opinion changed somewhat with time. As she learnt duty and responsibility, and found that Iridalan had a nasty streak about assignments, her hate softened into simple dislike. She knew that she was nothing more than an unpleasant duty. It didn't excuse Vincent's meanness, but it gave his actions reason. The pranks diminished, reduced to the occasional prank call, and stopped entirely when Iridalan gave her her first personal gun.

--

        The gun was a badge of sorts for the Turks in a world where only one other militant organization- SOLDIER- existed. Each to his own style of battle, but the gun was their reserve, last resort, and, in dire straits, lifesaver. (Even the Weapons Research and Medical departments had a gun each.) To be given a gun by the Leader meant you were an acknowledged member of the force, entrusted with responsibility and dependable. In her case, it meant she was no longer a child, and would not be given a child's leeway. It was proof of her maturity, and proof against her maturity. Anyway, even if she felt in need of a longer childhood, it could not have been tolerated, and there was no other place for her in all the lands.

        Diera herself never resented the road she had been shown. There would be other things to regret later, but her job was her pride, bloody though it was.

--

        The greatest game of her life began when she was ten, newly inaugurated and posted to the sleepy, lush town of Nibelheim with her mentor, playing bodyguards to Shinra's scientists. Diera wasn't exactly _announced_ to be a bodyguard; Frank Shinra would have gone ape shit at the idea of a prepubescent girl guarding his fortunes. She was just Vincent's niece, Dia Valentine, a tagalong. Lancir was around, of course, but only rarely seen. He had taken an instant dislike to Professor Hojo Kurayama, and since Hojo insisted on being omnipresent, the redhead went to the roof and stayed there all the time, ostensibly 'watching over the house'.

            Diera had, debatably, the worst situation of them all. Stuck with the job of playing niece _and_ keeping an eye on each male professor, Diera fumed at Vincent for mooning at Kamryn, bristled at Hojo, who bristled back at her, and simply did not know what to do with Gast. Harsh words flowed off Gast like water flows around a rock in a stream. The only thing she really held against him was that he hadn't even tried to stop Hojo the first time she got injected. Vincent hadn't done anything either, but she was resigned to not expect any help from Vincent. 

            So she watched, impatiently. Would these scientists be here _forever_?

            And then she heard... a little at first, then definitely out loud. She began keeping tabs on him. Hojo was asking after her medical history. Damned if she'd let him do what he wanted! It was the work of a half-hour to log into her data on the Public access and lock off all paths into her confidential files. Nothing a determined hacker couldn't get through, but if Hojo's informant was from the Turks- and she was fairly sure that the contact was one of her 'uncles'- then whoever it was would know that she disapproved, and withdraw out of courtesy.

            Sure enough, Hojo stopped talking about her, and he seemed to be annoyed. Let him be annoyed. She didn't like him anyway. Then he came up with something new.

            Further Mako enhancement.

--

            Diera did not think of her needle-phobia as 'fear'. She thought of it as 'hate'. And it worked, for her. She forced herself to sit where she had been shown on the first day of her arrival here. She succeeded in keeping still for about three minutes while Lucrecia vainly made soothing noises, and Hojo filled his syringe from a freaking _beaker_. Not even a sterilized vial, a _beaker_. She didn't know what was in that needle, but she didn't trust it. Not it, not him. Not even two-timing Kamryn, who didn't know her own mind. 

            Hojo squeezed some air bubbles out of the needle, and turned towards his subject, and said subject grabbed the chance to escape. Shooting off the table like greased lightning, she swiftly slammed a heel into his shin and followed it up with a high sweeping jumpkick, smashing the needle before it hit the ground. While he collapsed, howling like his first assistant had, she made her escape. 

            Vincent, noticeably, made no attempt (as before) to restrain or pursue his niece. Gast noted their silent mutual antagonism with wry humor, shaking his head and fetching the emergency cleaning equipment from a nearby cabinet. "And so specimen 00001a escapes again," he said dryly, as Hojo screamed incoherent curses in Wutai. "Make a note of that. 'Do not attempt to re-innoculate specimen 00001a with JENOVA cells, dead or alive. Hazardous.'"

------

Author's note: I wanted to fit in a sidestory (gaiden) here, so I changed it a bit. Besides, the formatting got screwed and my keyboard is trash. So forgive me for that... and review... I really want a review... more reviews... please....?


	3. Gaiden 1: While You Were Sleeping

Colors of War, Chapter 2a: While You Were Sleeping  
  
"DNA coding completed... this is great, Cai!" Lucrecia exclaimed in delight as the green numbers flashed across a black screen. Hojo smiled thinly at his fiancee from his side of the table, looking up from the detailed report he was scribing. "I didn't think we could complete it this early." She stepped round to peck him on the cheek, and he responded by laying a tender hand on the round swell of her burgeoning belly.  
  
"Be careful or you'll hurt the baby," he warned her in his quiet, dry voice, completely aware of a cold, wrathful gaze pinned on his back. Vincent was standing in the shadows by the door of the basement as usual, his cool brown eyes silent and brooding. Lucrecia caught his eye and uncomfortably looked away, recognizing male antagonism when she saw it. Hojo just smirked at the Turk, silently gloating at his upper hand, and turned away before Vincent could express his irritation in some other way. He did like having the last word.  
  
Too bad for Valentine.  
  
--  
  
Diera arrived soon after Vincent's tenure began, having found Lucrecia on the woman's increasingly frequent breaks from the labs, looking almost sick as she was directed into the dimly lit room. Lucrecia's almost sympathetic look in his direction told him that she understood the strange coldness associated with the labs, too. Gast tried to sweeten the girl's temper with a few gentle remarks, but Hojo and the little girl took one look at each other and hated the other on sight. Well, Hojo would probably have loved to have her stretched out on a dissection table, and Diera would definitely have loved to empty her Firebird rifle into his important parts, but it was a rather bad feeling nevertheless.   
  
  
  
Necessity dictated that Diera submit to some indignity from the scientist, however. She had been one of the principal lab rats for the initial research, and the scientists had discovered a stable method for the enhancement just half a week before the girl arrived. Due to a lack of wherewithal for human experiment and Vincent's steady refusal to let anyone touch him with a syringe, the silently furious little girl found herself sitting on the dissection table and letting Hojo near her with a syringe filled with their newest brew of Mako. Planet above, she hated that stuff!  
  
  
  
The contents went in, Diera turned white, and Hojo had come up with yet another needle.   
  
  
  
'Crazy' did not describe what the cadet did at that point. 'Ballistic' and 'stark raving mad' came to mind. She kicked him in the gut, throwing him to the ground, and took off for fresh air, and freedom. A number of samples were rendered completely unusable in the process, since she was indiscriminate about exactly what she went through to reach that outlet.   
  
  
  
Gast was kind enough to simply shake his head and set about cleaning up.  
  
  
  
Lucrecia was speechless, mortified.  
  
  
  
Hojo simply lay on the ground, eyes rolled up into his head, and steamed.  
  
  
  
--  
  
Much, much later, when the sun had set and he was free to go out to look for his unwilling student, Vincent left the underground depths of the Shinra Mansion and went Diera-hunting. He eventually tracked her down in the depths of the lush Nibel Mountains, composure quite recovered, standing on the old rope bridge and looking out at the twilight-darkened landscape.  
  
  
  
"...That's Kamryn?" It was the first word she had said since that introduction. Privately, Vincent would have preferred that his unwanted trainee remain quiet. She would mention Lucrecia's pregnancy, and he would then feel angry about it. It was just one of those things that irked him no end.   
  
  
  
"So what if it is?" he replied, hoping to discourage her.  
  
No such luck there. Diera slanted a thoughtful look at him. "I didn't know you liked fat women."  
  
He thumped her over the head, catching a glancing blow as she ducked (but not quite fast enough.) "That's called pregnancy, imp, and I don't want to talk about it. Go annoy Hojo." If the scientist managed to put up with Diera at her determined worst for an hour, Vincent decided, he must be truly superhuman. And the ruckus could be quite interesting.  
  
But the small girl didn't take the bait, falling quiet for a while.  
  
Then…  
  
  
  
"Vincent, what's pregnancy?"  
  
- 


	4. Gaiden 2: From a Distance

Colors of War Chapter 2b: Reflections  
  
Every day I watch you with me, with him, and my heart burns.  
  
Love in its most painful form.  
  
This is something Diera must learn eventually. I would rather she not learn at all.   
  
Don't get me wrong. I detest the whelp. She'll get herself killed sooner or later. Still, this is soething I would not wish on even someone as genuinely annoying as she is. Someone will teach her of love and its pain, but not me. I'm old enough to be her father, for mercy's sake. It's like cradle-robbing or something. Disgusting. Besides, she's nothing like Lucrecia. Nothing like you at all, my love, my capricious forbidden beauty.  
  
To tell you the truth, I cannot in all honesty say that you have good taste. Binding yourself to that disgusting slug of a Wutaian was, is an appalling display of horrible taste. I guess, for a Turk, binding my fortune to yours must seem an appalling display of horrible judgement to them. Diera, that little minx, said as much, said what others yet fear to think in my presence. I was so angry- later I was sorry, but I do not think she has quite forgotten that I can mop the floor with her if I feel like it. She hardly says anything to me now that is not an act, and I hardly speak to her of anything outside work or training.   
  
It is ironing that this has started over you, my sleeping beauty, over the angel I saw in the girl who dozed on my shoulder on that first, fateful helicopter ride. Many women have slept beside me before you, but none awakened the same quiet wonder that I felt in those moments. Diera so far has only managed to arouse anything remotely 'fond' from me a handful of times, and each time I had to barricade my idiot emotion up and lock it away. She is an annoying, manipulative, adolescent twit- everything I have raised her to be. And yet, despite all the hell I have gone through to raise that girl, she still is able to inspire the same feeling in me that you do. More rarely, of course, and I think she works at not inspiring anything but anger in me, now, but I cannot shake the feeling that it is the same things. Planet forbid that I feel any affection for Diera. And still, again and again, I wonder…  
  
I guess that now I will never know again. I do not even want to explore that possibility. Not only would Iridalan and Lancir kill me, I think Diera herself would, too. I know I would. She hates me because I hate her. Any weakness now, after all these years, would be seen as a liability on her side. Diera has a distinct tendency to dispose of liabilities. No, it is far less troubling and much more fulfilling to remain by your side, my love, though you never really see me. You choose to see Hojo for his mind, and you see me for what you think I am, and it pains me so, but this is the love I have chosen, and this love I know I will give my life for.  
  
Rest well tonight, my sleeping beauty, and never know the pain you cause me.   
  
I love you, Lucrecia Kamryn, and though your heart is with another, know that I am always by your side. I am your black knight in dark armor, your secret magician who brings to life the fantasies a scientist should not have. And your side I will never leave, not as long as my life is still within me.  
  
**  
  
Author's notes: …..wow. I was almost running dry by the time I wrote this (damn, starting a plotted story is so hard!) so I think, all things considered, it turned out rather well. All through the game I kept wondering, why in the world did Vincent- very handsome and probably many a girl's heartthrob- stick by a woman who cheated on him? I think maybe he was a) a masochist or b) hopelessly in love. This is my attempt to combine the two, and if Diera seems to intrude a lot, remember that he spent the last twelve years raising her; that tends to put them in people's minds quite often, whether the thinker wants it or not! I spent 4 years with someone in the same school, 3 of them in the same class, and after I left the country I keep thinking of that her so often that I'm surprised I don't expect to see her in the same room with me half the time. And that's just 4 years, think about 10 years. Very normal.   
  
Ps: Wonder why nobody's reviewing. Is my writing really that bad?  
  
Puzzled,   
  
Akishira 


	5. Leviathan

Colors of War, Chapter 3: Premonitions

            "That's quite enough," he said quietly, stopping at the door to the indoor greenhouse, which had been shut and presumably bolted. He didn't really know for sure that it was his charge inside, but he could hear breathing and this door was usually never shut. "It's going to look odd if you disappear without saying something to them."

            A clear 'hmph' drifted under the door. "Got nothing to say to _them_."

            So it was her in there, after all. Vincent changed tack. "At least fake a little so that we can apply properly for your discharge leave. I have to send in our reports anyway."

            "...you promise?" It was small and startlingly childlike. She hadn't sounded like that in what seemed to be forever. No, of course she had grown out of it ages ago. Didn't children do that just before they turned eight? 

            "I promise." Play along with it. Maybe she was catching a flu. She came out then, dressed in one of the frilly white Contresieran dresses that the disguise department had cooked up for her. Distinctly dingy and definitely ragged in places where she had carelessly scraped the material against walls and floors, it added an element of tomfoolery to her now-forced jester's mask, but he didn't really care what she looked like as long as her brain was mostly intact, since that was the most valuable part of her. 

            Taking her firmly by the hand, the older Turk led her back down into the basement, noting, with grudging approval, that she was keeping her smart remarks to herself. Not two years ago she would have been howling about the injustice of it all, attacking him with especially barbed bluntness. He'd broken her jaw when she called Lucrecia a two-timer, even though he knew it was true- she was cheating equally on him and Hojo. Diera didn't understand how words hurt people... but she seemed to be learning. "Dia had something to do elsewhere," he announced shortly, ushering them both into the lab. "So she's here to say goodbye." Silence. "Aren't you?" He nudged her with a foot. 

            The girl jumped guiltily, having been matching glares with Hojo, who was sporting a cast on his broken shin. "Uh-- yeah. Goodbye. Sorry." Shooting the Wutaian another hate-filled glare which he returned with gusto, she ducked under Vincent's arm and disappeared up the stairs again. Vincent shook said arm reflexively and went to his usual post in a niche by the door. 

            She knew where their papers were, how to write her own report, and where to get transport.

            She would be fine on her own.

--

            Indignation aside, Diera dutifully did what Vincent expected her to do, setting off for the main headquarters in the Corel Range with the local dispatches in her innocuous bunny backpack. Nibelheim's sparse Turk office was mostly grassroots network. Most of the people weren't even aware that they worked for the Turks (for free too). One of those contacts had an investment in Chocobo Bill's, in any case, and it was the simple work of a sob story to procure a blue bird suitable for crossing the numerous streams in the path of her conveyance.

            Of course she also went through the reports. The only way any small fry like herself could stay ahead of the big operatives in the line of duty was to know everything about anything in her reach. 

            La Contresiera was engaged in feeble attempts to build up its military defenses, recently distracted from its petty games of honor. Even Diera, who lacked real battle experience, could see that it wasn't working. Too long a time spent lax. But why the sudden need to beef up? She frowned in concentration and read on, not noticing when her mount slowed by the Nibelheim-Cosmo ford, warking to itself and rooting around for greens to snack on. 

            Shinra... Shinra was rattling spears with the Wutai shogunate and the Contresieran royalty. 

            A weapons company indeed. 

            A weapons company with Mako superpower backing it.

            So that meant... "War," the cadet whispered, folding the report back into its envelope. Suddenly the prospect of war looked huge. Would she be posted to fight in it? She hadn't been in a real, tactics-driven battle before- she just eliminated anyone in her way- but suddenly here was an opportunity to be commanded. Would the Turks be fighting with or against Shinra? Depended on which way Iridalan's decision turned, but she didn't want to go up against Shinra's Mako power. On the other hand, Wutai boasted a considerable battle history and fantastic martial exponents. Neither power was one she cared to test herself against. 

            Taking her Chocobo's reins firmly in both hands again, she kicked it into a slow run along the shallow waters of the Nibelheim-Cosmo delta. Time for a visit to La Contresiera. Uncle Iri could jolly well wait for his reports. She had to ask Uncle Arvill something. 

--

            La Contresiera was considered even by the Turks to be one of the most disgraceful places on the Planet. Yes, it was filthy rich, but it was still disgraceful. All kinds of prostitution; the Turks acknowledged the necessity of the 'service' industry, but some of it was just plain gruesome. It was one of the reasons why the Turks had moved to the Coral Mountain base. That and the exorbitant bribes the authorities charged to register under their official rolls. 

            Diera entered this vile city with the general air of a tourist going out. Her uncles and aunties had had photos of its archaic architecture and spiralling flute towers, a sight to inspire longing in any child. As a precaution, however, she kept her gun and dirk handy, remembering their warnings of slaver gangs grabbing children for child prostitution. One could never be too careful. 

            A number of pimps met bloody castration that day, and Diera was cheerfully bloody by the time she stepped into Arvill Mclachlan's office. Arvill was one of her favorite uncles, a deceptively gruff hands-on kind of person who could be trusted to tell her things she needed to know, a useful thing when people either saw you as an adult with responsibility, a baby, or something to be ignored. "Hi, uncle!" she called, grinning at his quizzically raised eyebrow. "Got a camera handy? I saw this really funny Chocobo dance-"

            He put down the papers he had been reading, changed his mind, and smacked her over the head with them as she moved into reach. "Nobody raised you to go cavorting in Contresiera without a guide," he told her sternly, matching her glare for affronted glare. "Look here, even if you do see those thugs about, you've no call to butcher them that way. And _don't_," he warned as she opened her mouth, "tell me you haven't. No other part of the body bleeds that way, and that much. Who showed you how to do that anyway?"

            Actually it was the detailed books on anatomy Vincent made her read to 'keep her out of trouble', but she wasn't about to give nasty Vincent any credit. Rubbing her crown, the slender cadet climed up on his leather chair, spinning it around in lazy circles. "They thought I was easy prey. I did what I saw fit. And that's a secret." Diera waggled a finger at him. "You people raised me that way. Besides, I don't have a PHS, and you didn't know I was coming." Smugly she put her feet up on the edge of his expensive teak table and steepled her fingers in a blatant imitation of some third-rate cartoon detective. 

            Who was letting her watch that kind of trash? Mclachlan thought grimly, smacking her again. "You could have just given a warning shot, and DON'T SIT IN MY CHAIR LIKE THAT!" Diera's smirk faded into a thwarted pout, and she put her feet down properly, crossing her arms in a defiant way. "Nobody taught you to do a lot of what you do, so keep a lid on it."

            Hopping off the swivel chair, she shrugged. "I repeat- that's the way you people raised me."

            Arvill rolled his eyes. "Yeah, blame it on the babysitters, what else is new? More importantly, what in the seven hells are you doing here? Shouldn't you be hanging around Valentine and V2 in the Nibel area?"

            "I got new orders," she replied nonchalantly, rooting around in the bunny backpack.

            He took one look at the envelope she waved in his face and made a grab for it. She skipped away nimbly, laughing. "Not so fast, not so fast. I got to ask you something." Suddenly intent, all smiles gone, she put the report behind her back and leaned slightly forward. "How long's our deal with Shinra? What's the details?"

            Arvill scowled at her. "That's confidential information, pest."

            "Believe me, I've been into the classified files already. I won't blab, Uncle Arvill, so trust me. Please?" Trying for 'cute and innocent', she was rewarded by a sigh and shake of his greying auburn head.

            "Our contract with Shinra lasts until the end of next year," Arvill told her resignedly. "The contract's too long for me to recite offhand, but it books out complete loyalty to Shinra for three billion girl worth of weaponry, delivered in installments over our three-year contract."

            Diera looked stricken. "That's the most unreasonable contract I've ever heard of! Why-"

            Taking her shoulder, Arvill plucked the report from her unresisting hands. "Don't ask me, princess, ask Iridalan. He's the one who signed the contract, so he's got his reasons. Now, why are the reports with you, and why are you here?"

            "Vincent told me to deliver the reports to Corel," she said numbly, her mind caught in the implications of this new concept. "I had to come and ask." Seeming to shake herself awake, she tugged at his hand, retrieving the report deftly. "Now I've asked. I'll- go. Have a good day-"

            Arvill grabbed her long braid before she could stumble out like a sleepwalker. "Not with your dress like that, pest. I'll ring Corel to expect your delay, not that Iridalan doesn't know everything anyway. You're going down to supplies to collect a shirt and shorts, then wash up, and I'll detail one of the others to get your sorry ass out of the city gates."

            She glanced up with a flash of her old, impious humor. "For the safety of the gangsters?"

            "For the safety of the gangsters," he agreed solemnly. "Now go and clean up."

--


	6. Numbers

Colors of War, Chapter 4: Left Behind

            Within the hour she was on her way, minus 'civilian' casualties, on her initial course. As scheduled, she stopped to spend the night at Cosmo Canyon (though it was extremely late by the time she led her mount up the steps) by the ever-burning Cosmo Candle. (It would make a handy bonfire.)

            There seemed to be an awful number of old people up so late at night, though. She frowned up at the tanned, middle-aged man who came to take her mount's reins, holding them just out of his reach. "Who're you?"

            The stranger bristled at her blunt distrust, drew himself up with enormous dignity, and replied. "I am Elder Handret, sent to conduct you to Elder Bugenhagen."

            You and the monkey behind you, she thought derisively, and, leaving him behind, stalked toward the gathering of people clustered about the Cosmo Candle. What was going on? Weird old men with weird old ideas should stay at home. She wanted to sleep. These people were getting in her way. "Am I interrupting something?" she demanded curtly, her free hand on her hip. They turned and stared at her, inscrutably weathered nut-brown faces lined up in rows- no, in a circle, really- like they were preparing for a ritual- "Hey!" she protested as Handret grabbed the reins and disappeared into the dusky darkness, or tried to disappear. The enhancement had given her excellent night vision- 20/20 vision, even- enough to pick out the silver in Handret's hair by the flickering scarlet illumination available. She scowled at the next gnarled hand that directed her forward into the center of the circle, next to the bonfire. "What is it you people _want_?" the cadet said with youthful rudeness, plopping herself down cross-legged where someone had helpfully put a plain dirt-colored cushion.

            Poker faces, worn into eternal masks by the harsh winds that had carved the Canyon from bedrock, presented her with insensibility. Insensible disapproval of her abrasive manner. Realizing that she wasn't going to eat- or sleep- until they finished their obscure rite, she shifted into a more comfortable position, making a conscious effort to relax her aggressive body language. "All right, I'm listening, I'm listening. But can you please make it quick?" She really wanted to sleep...

            One heavily whiskered face bobbed above the rest, supported by a scrawny-looking body heavily shrouded in purple and green robes. He was, she saw as he glided jerkily forward, floating on a device that somewhat resembled a large green mushroom cap. At least that was what it looked like to her tired eyes. Something like that, anyway... "We knew you were coming, hoo hoo hoo!" he chuckled, stopping in front of her. The Elders, having arranged themselves in a circle, closed ranks behind him. Diera glanced at them, then at him, like a trapped rat, warily. "You have nothing to fear from us, hoo hoo hoo! Food and rest we have prepared, only hear what we say to you."

            Not much choice anyway... "Is it that important?"

            "Important?" May be, may not. Could concern Planet, could concern only you. Time will tell," one of the Elders intoned softly, stirring a twisted finger in the mounds of dust on the ground. 

            "The fact is," Bugenhagen continued smoothly, "we don't know anything about you, which is unusual. Our people have been building profiles from horoscopes for centuries. It is not impossible to ask the stars these questions, you know," he said, smiling at her disbelief. "With the correct forms, one can tell the course of a person's destiny. However, the stars say nothing about you."

            Diera shrugged. "Nobody knows exactly when I was born," she said nonchalantly. "So-"

            He waggled a walking stick at her. (Why did he need a walking stick anyway?) "Do you really think we run around getting maternity ward records, girl? All we need is a picture, a name, an age. Any two will do. The Cosmos knows. It does not seem to recognize you, though. Do you have any idea why?"

            She glared at him. "What are you getting at, sir?"

            "You could change the world," one Elder murmured, bringing an involuntary twitch from the dark-haired cadet, who squashed the urge to glance at him. "Wutai's Shogun Kamikire, Contresiera's Marshal Longburn, great people- all of them had their fortunes found with our telling and our blessing. You are the first and only person who lacks a destiny."

            "I don't need a destiny. I don't need people telling me about my life!" She dragged herself to her feet, fed up with all this mysticism, fed up with being kept awake past midnight for senseless old babbling. "I'll do what us humans do all the time. I'll make my own future! So shove off!"

            She was hunting for a way out of their circle when Bugenhagen spoke, louder and strangely grim. "Do you intend to continue killing as you do now, unregretful and unchecked?"

            Diera gave him a violet glare, deciding to try for a running jump. "Are you asking me to quit the Turks?" she said coldly, well and truly annoyed. This old guy- "I'm not a nature person, gramps, I can't be a person like you. What's wrong with killing them, anyway? They've got it coming to them if they get in the way. I'll get rid of everything in my way, that's all.."

            He drew himself up, projecting what majesty he still had left. "And am I one of the things in your way, young Raistlorne?"

            Deliberately, Diera turned her back on him. What a stupid question. As if she _wanted_ to be understood, much less by this annoying petrified stump. Didn't he know that being open made cracks for blackmail, for attack? Stupid old man. A short run and jump brought her to the world outside. None of the elders had moved, not even Bugenhagen- it was just a feeling she had, of course- but a young boy immediately stepped forward, his dark face inquiring. She glared at him, putting all her hostile irritation into it- how dare he be so energetic at two in the morning?- and he paled, hastily ushering her off to the Inn.

            But with every step she took, she felt old eyes on her back, old stern, reproachful eyes with the weight of decades behind them, drilling grim holes in her back. And it scared her, a little, that these old relics could believe so deeply in something about her. She didn't believe what they did, and had the feeling that they had seen something in her she could never accept.

            She was scared... and it was a fear that couldn't be taken care of with a gun.

            The worst kind of fear.

--

            "Oi, wake up!"

            Morning came with a loud, painful crash that left her with an aching head. She tumbled out of bed, clawing wearily at her long, tangled hair and wondering what all the fuss was about. "I'm awake, I'm awake, I'm awake," she mumbled, half asleep. Vincent was really angry today, she thought blurrily, had he been dumped by that Lucrecia woman?

            ....'oi'?

            Did Vincent...use words like that? It was a Wutaian... word...

            "Sleeping late's no excuse for not waking up early!" the voice barked, cutting sharply though the cobwebs in her brain. 

_She did not know this voice._

 The red light shining through the door flamed an answering spark in her tired mind. 

            "Cosmo Canyon," she gasped out loud, blinking furiously, seeing the person before her for the first time. The Elders- the eyes-

            "Are you awake or not?" A large, calloused hand cuffed her ear, adding discordant jangles to the persistent buzzing that permeated her awareness. She slapped reflexively at it, catching a glancing blow, punctuated by a quiet grunt. "So you're the brat Blackthorne brought out from nowhere?" It was a tall, heavy-set man of middle age, strangely pale in the ruddy light of what lay outside. Dressed in the formal navy suit of the working Turks, he had oddly white-shaded hair, his eyes obscured behind wraparound sunglasses. A soapy, slightly oily smell hung around him, eddying lazily in her sensitive nose. She sneezed, earning an irritated sigh from the man. "What's your name and rank, brat?"

            What was he? Not the true dark coffee color of the native Corellians, certainly, but not the snowy beige of most Contresieran nobles, either. This Turk was true white, from top to fingertip (all she could see of his skin anyway), even vaguely through to his ears. "Diera Raistlorne, unpartnered cadet-trainee," she replied with half a mind, still studying this stranger's oddities. "What's your name and rank, then? By the way, why are you all white?" 

            "Winter Doros, partnered with Ihirle Tanana, Lariat rank. And this," he tapped his chin with one white thumb- "this is called albino. It's a recessive gene. What you're smelling is my skin lotion." For a white guy, he seemed awfully proud of his 'gene'. Being a golden-skinned mongrel breed of apparent Mideelan descent herself, Diera was curious about the reason for his pride. She'd never found much to be proud of in her own rare violet eyes, which sparkled like a whirling suncatcher in any light, even without light. Vincent was hard to scare with the whole glowing-eyes-in-the-dark thing, so she'd given up on trying to startle him with it long ago. She opened her mouth to ask what was so great about his white skin, but he cut her off as she drew breath to speak. "The district boss sent me to take you to the Canyon base. You've been given a change of orders."

            All the breath escaped her in a loud hiss. "You kidding? I've reports to deliver!"

            "Scheduled to go with today's Chocobo courier," he answered easily, snagging her bunny backpack from its place beside her pillow. "Hurry up, then. The dumb blond chick leaves in an hour, and the boss is a busy guy." She indignantly scrambled to follow, puzzled about this strange occurrence. Why take her off her job? What had she done wrong? "Oh, by the way- your sleeping posture. It's horrible. You should do something about it-"

            "SHUT UP!"

------


	7. Deutrinium

Colors of War, Chapter 5: Rising Star

            Suspended for talking back to Bugenhagen AND dissing Hojo. 

Grounded for a week.

            Yeesh. Word really got around fast.

            "It's not fair! You'd have done it too if you were there," she groused under her breath as she kicked the boss's office door shut behind her. Gemmell Hurst was not a man of many words or evident expression, but he had made it abundantly clear that her gun (and thus her 'license') might be confiscated until her behaviour (at least in public) matched with the Turk service code. She had to step carefully here. But that didn't lessen the feeling that she had been unfairly judged. Hadn't she done what every other Turk would do?

            Maybe this was another lesson, she decided, wandering down the unfamiliar concrete-plastered tunnels. But what would it teach? Vincent wasn't here, so the lesson probably wouldn't go his way. She'd never been trained under people outside the Corel headquarters before, and that was a big problem. Whose idea was this anyway?-

            - of course. Uncle Iri. He was the only one with the peeve, not to mention the authority, to suspend people for dissing clients. The Cosmo base would have called him shortly before she went to bed, and Hojo was wimp enough to kick up a fuss immediately after she left Nibelheim. That meant she had been on the official blacklist since a little after exiting Nibelheim. Vincent should have gone after her then, even if he didn't know she had changed direction for La Contresiera. He had more than enough authority and temperament to impose the suspension on her. Which meant...

            ...Cosmo Canyon's goodwill... meant more to the Turks than Shinra?

            No, impossible. Uncle Iri wouldn't be so sentimental. He should have ordered her suspension immediately. Maybe Vincent had misplaced his PHS... but Vincent NEVER misplaced anything. Since he had not come out after her, no communication could have arrived. Then what had happened to the suspension order?

            Why hadn't Uncle Iri ordered an immediate suspension?

            "It's not FAIR!" she yelled, exasperatedly throwing her hands up and storming off to the main offices. Maybe there was a computer she could use to hack through to the Turk network. She had to have _something_ solid to work on!

--

            Cosmo Canyon, while extremely pacifist, was also the base of the single largest training facility (run, of course, by the Turks) in the world. Not even the Wutai SOLDIER branch could surpass Cosmo Canyon in terms of facility. All the twisting, wind-carved ravines were the best tests of a cadet's ability to survive- battered by wind, lacking all water, bathed with sunfire by day and faced with harsh earth all the time, turned loose alone or perhaps in groups, the full-fledged Turks- and the annual graduates of each SOLDIER generation- which emerged from their traditional week-long purgatory were recognized internationally as survivors, cunning as a Nibelheim Roc and harder to kill than cockroaches (which was generally an accurate assumption, but that didn't stop people from trying). 

            It naturally followed that all the real oddities in the Turk force asked to be posted there. (Actually getting posted there was another thing entirely.) Cosmo Canyon was the hub of ultra-modern civilisation, a bit of the universe where things always clicked under the benevolent eye of the very-nearly-omnipotent Cosmo Elders. Besides, it was conveniently spaced to allow speedy commute between the Gold Saucer, Gongaga and Nibelheim, not to mention La Contresiera, at a moment's notice. If you liked having variety and a good time watching trainees suffer while you recounted your glowing experiences to them, you went and asked the Leader to put you in Cosmo Canyon Base.

            Diera pondered this while her pilfered terminal monitor scrolled frantically down a white expanse filled with rows and rows of speeding characters. Running a hack-search program on a database as large as the Turks' was bound to take a few hours which had to be carefully kept a secret. It was frowned upon if you did your hacking in front of other people. Diera had not yet learned what the difference was, but she had been told that it would come to her eventually and so she put it down to another of the funny things adults did. In any case, she was currently amused at the absolute organized chaos of the Cosmo Canyon Offices. 

            Partnered and unpartnered Turks dashed everywhere, the local Turks in their suits of businesslike navy and the assigned Turks in their unique sets of preferred gear. Most of them went for leather and steel- heavy on the defence- but a few had travelling cloaks wound about their shoulders, either about to leave on their assignments or just back from their field work. Vincent's casual gear was leather, steel AND cloak, no matter when or what the assignment was; Uncle Iri had only persuaded him to wear the suit for the Shinra job by saying that Kamryn would probably prefer a neat, businesslike man to a windswept vagabond. (Diera had been eavesdropping just inside Uncle Iri's door, behind the potted plant. Uncle Iri had known, of course, and Vincent had deliberately had a little 'accident' as he exited his leader's office. She rather thought that Uncle Iri had to replace the stump that remained of his ornamental Wutaian bamboo.)

            And, as with all things pertaining to Kamryn (or most of them), Vincent had allowed himself to be convinced. Diera sighed, resting her chin on her knees as the swivel chair creaked lazily to itself. She had grown up with the stern, eternally annoyed Vincent. Vincent in love was... disconcerting. It seemed like a contradiction of all the cardinal virtues he had passed on to her- detachment, ruthlessness, expedience, and so on- all the qualities that made a good Turk. Yet Uncle Iri didn't seem to be scolding Vincent for not being a good Turk, so did that mean that she could be a good Turk without being detached, ruthless, expedient?

            ... it was... not her place to question what the adults did or did not do. 

            Someday, she thought to herself, a smirk crawling across her lips, she would be an adult, and then to hell with Vincent. Not, she sighed, that he bothered himself much with her nowadays. He'd actually been rather accommodating with her desire to get away from Hojo and Nibelheim only a while ago. It disturbed her belief that he was her perfect enemy. What kind of enemy helped you get out of trouble? She sighed again, wistfully. Things had been so much simpler when he had been the harsh cold instructor. Now that he was confused, in love and even a little helpful, it was impossible to label him as surely as she would have done two or three years ago. How in the world could she exact her revenge now? It seemed foolish, petty. Totally uncool. 

            "Hey, princess," a young male voice called, and a hand forcibly raked its way through her already-messy hair. Diera gave an indignant yell of pain as it yanked out knots of hair root-first, clawing frantically to swat the hand away before he could wreak further havoc on her hair. Being a person who found personal grooming time-consuming and annoying, Diera stuck to the basics, dry-washing whenever she could. Her hair, raggedly long and often tied with anything that was handy, was essentially a mass of impish knots. Most of the Turks she knew were considerate enough to let her hair alone. And of those who couldn't resist, only one called her 'princess'.

            Shoving her disturbed coils of dirty hair back into some semblance of order, the cadet spun her seat around and kicked out at a chortling young Turk. "I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE MY HAIR _ALONE_, ASHNER!" she screamed angrily, throwing her pencil at him haphazardly. He dodged adroitly, earning scattered applause from other Turks in the vicinity. Trust him to pop up when she was grounded! she thought grumpily, rubbing her aching scalp. For her future intended partner, Silk Ashner was a royal pain in the ass. She usually got on with him, but Silk was an unmitigated bastard and enjoyed letting people know it. She'd WARNED him not to touch her hair-

            In addition to being a ruffian at heart, Silk Ashner was tallish for a teenage boy, pale blond, and powerfully handsome (as well as aware of it, much to Diera's disgust). He had once been the heir to a Contresieran margrave, then a Contresieran prostitute for some time after that. By the time Uncle Iri picked him up out of the streets to be a Turk, Margrave Ashner was thoroughly desperate to retrieve his family honour. Uncle Iri had cheerfully taken all the money thrown at him, as well as the promise that the Margrave would keep both ears on the local politics for the Turk network.

            Silk had snickered at his father's discomfiture, but he wasn't so amused when he was put in a rehab cell to go 'cold turkey'. Uncle Iri had known very well that Silk's pimp had him on demon's star, a powerful antidepressant that was terribly cheap, though tightly controlled, and there was no sensible use for such a glaring weakness, so it had to go. When it went, though, the boy had developed a marvellous set of reflexes which Uncle Iri viewed as a nice bonus.

            Maybe it had been the bedevilment of a moment, or maybe Uncle Iri was just trying to be funny, but Silk had been introduced to her as her partner-to-be the day after she recieved her first gun. He, like her, had been one of the lowest-ranked operatives, but he WAS higher than her now, a recognized member of the force by the insignia on his lapel, rifle-rank at least. She stopped trying to hit him, but kept her fist ready just in case Silk decided to tease her again.

            Fortunately, he seemed to be focusing on something else. "Where'd you come from?"

            "La Contresiera," she said irritatedly, swivelling back to glare at her screen as it bleeped and cleared into sensible words. "And where'd YOU come from? I didn't know you were posted here."

            He dismissed her question with an airy wave of his spiky gloved hand. "La Contresiera."

            That startled her enough for her to glance sharply at him. "When?"

            "I came in about an hour after you did, by bypassing the town. Heard you getting chewed out by those screaming pacifists, actually."

            "And you didn't even think about _helping_ me?" she suggested acidly, jabbing a finger up at him.

            Silk grinned. "Nope! You were just fine without me. What're you looking up?" He leant over her shoulder, scanning the document headings that had popped up. "Shinra's next move? I thought you said you jut came in from Contresiera."

            "I _did_," was her snapped, piqued reply, punctuated by a swift, black frown. "And I saw Uncle Arvill first thing when I gat there yesterday. What didn't he tell me?"

            "Oh, nothing much. Just that we've been ordered to obliterate La Contresiera within two months, and to spread the evacuation order." She shot up in her chair and stared at him, then fell over sideways at his sly smirk and waved hand. "Just joking. You're too serious, princess. Shinra will lose steam eventually. No point being paranoid, you know?" Reaching over, he tapped the screen with a thumb. "Here's my apology. Take a look at the reports from Wutai and SOLDIER."

            She called up the Wutai report, mouth moving silently as she perused the steady black lines. "You're on the SOLDIER recruitment?" she remarked, surprised. "How much did they promote you?" Soldier only truly trusted the recruiting ability of fairly high-level operatives. It had only been maybe two years since she last saw him- so how had he gotten promoted so fast?

            Silk grinned. Or maybe it was just his normal grin grown wider. "I'm sniper class now, princess. Eat that! Not a ranked operative, but a classed agent! Iridalan bumped me up after I cleared out that nest in the Icicle Area." His grin faded until it was just a stretching of lips. "We lost Kimmer and Snowy, though."

            "We weren't supposed to," a second, tired voice broke in on their conversation. Diera glanced up at the speaker and blinked, recognizing him. Uncle Dan, Daniel Skoll to his peers, unpartnered and as usual unshaven, leant on the partition between his cell and Diera's borrowed one. She recognized him from a set of profiles Vincent had set her to study, just another one from many faces. A chronic depression case, his profile had said, good with fighting but heavy on the cynicism and hard liquor. Getting close to retirement age. By the looks of it, he had put in his application for discharge already. What had happened in the North? "It was monsters," he elaborated at her questioning look. "Sleeping ones. They woke up when Kimmer lit his cig. Came towards the heat, attacked us. Not enough fire on hand to kill them all. Wasn't enough of us, either. The caves were stuffed. Iri only sent three pairs. The boy ran back to the village and got barrels of beer, then we burned the nest out."

            Diera's brow wrinkled deeper. "But Uncle Kim and Snowman- didn't you retrieve them?"

            Silk grimaced. "Kimmer stayed to light the fire, and Snowy wouldn't leave him. They're- they were partners, after all. The only things were managed to retrieve were their guns. Not enough left of their bodies to fill my palm with ash. The worst thing is that we should have known; the Icicle Area's always been a monster-infested place. Hell, it's the ONLY place in the world with monsters! Why d'you think Iri promoted me that highly?" His throaty baritone had slipped into a thick country Contresieran accent with agitation, a sure sign that he was more affected than he cared to admit.

            The cadet's frown eased into lines of comprehension. "To cover up his mistake?"

            Saluting her with a dry jerk of his eyebrow, Silk glanced up at the man (who appeared to be about to collapse on the cell partition) and spread his hands. "Ours not to reason why. Didn't Iridalan give y' your retirement pay yet, Skoll?"

            The furry-looking del Solar shrugged. "Don't have the guts for it. 'Sides, I have a son waiting to enter the ranks. Can't croak on him just yet."

            "You're just retiring, not dying," Diera murmured, turning back to her computer. She missed the troubled looks that passed between both Turks. Her mind had turned back to the SOLDIER reports. SOLDIER, which had existed long before the Turks did, nevertheless got its recruits off each successive generation of Turks. According to hearsay, Cavall Turk (the first Leader) had started out as the head of Recruitment for SOLDIER, and opened up his own company in tandem with Shinra when Commander Kingston voiced disapproval of Cavall's preference for underhanded tactics. As a sign of goodwill, however, Cavall had continued his duties, delegating authority to his lieutenants to swell the ranks of their mother company. That way, SOLDIER was buddy-buddy with the Turks, and where straight fighting or exceptional tactics was needed, each force could donate some of its personnel. Quite a tidy arrangement for both sides.

            This particular report dealt with Shinra's tendering for SOLDIER'S services in the near future. By the amount of money named, they were fairly serious about having the brawl of the century. It got more suspicious the more she glared at it. Why hire the Turks AND SOLDIER? Clearing out all opposition? To make matters worse, this report had none of the Commander's comments in it, and so it was up to her to draw her own conclusions. Diera did most of that well enough on her own, but her conclusions were generally, as Vincent put it, lopsided. Stuck between childishness and maturity. Keeping that in mind, she knew well enough to ask other people what they thought before making a fool of herself. Even if she didn't like the people she was asking... "Ashner, did you get into the SOLDIER compound recently?"

            He spun a pen deftly in his nimble fingers, grinning again. "Aaaahh, asking lil' ol' me?"

            Reminding herself to be patient, Diera gritted her teeth and tried again. "Please?"

            She was lucky today. Silk was amenable. "You're gonna owe me a favor, princess," he chortled, rolling his chair closer to her terminal. "Look here, what do you want about the SOLDIERs?" She was neatly wheeled out of the way, disgruntled but relieved as the older teen started checking the programs she had run. "Mind, if it's in too deep you'll have to do it yourself." Skoll tipped his head politely at Diera and dropped back into his cubicle, tactfully overlooking the hackers.

            "Nothing much. Can you bring up the growth stats for SOLDIER?"

            "Can a rabbit jump?" he said disdainfully, fingers busy at the keyboard.

            Growth had gone from a steady 2% per year to 15% per year. Someone was gearing up for a major confrontation, as she suspected. Now, was Shinra behind this jump? It was unlikely- Shinra could not dictate Iridalan's judgment- but there were always ways... "The recruitment rolls for the past years... starting from just before that increased year?"

            Silk made a short, disgusted sound. "Still digging for Shinra stuff?"

            "What's it to you? The rolls, Ashner." Mentally she tried to piece together the areas under Shinra semi-control, failed, and set about scribbling on the back of a calendar page. Her script was spidery and uneven, wandering across the page, but it would do. Likewise for the sketch map, and she didn't care. Shinra made and sold the rare mineral pearls called materia, a byproduct of their new Mako energy experiments. Where they set their roots, people sang their praises- easy to find. Right then they had settled in Nibelheim, going through to Corel and through to the Eastern Continent from _there_. Anyone from this rather large area was suspect. Of course, that was a lot of people that was suspect. Probably not the best criteria... and then she looked at the rolls that Silk had dug up for her, and she knew that it was Shinra, all right.

            The Turks had a tradition of talking balance, all the way. Equal numbers from each town, Wutai included. It helped to promote improvement among each town's youths. Children of every generation, every town, dreamed of joining SOLDIER, rising in the ranks, and coming home covered in fame and glory. The best five or so, chosen by the Turks by process of obscure elimination, were the ones who actually got to SOLDIER, and new batches were chosen every month or so. Recently it had gone all the way up to fifteen per town, and Wutai had stopped offering candidates altogether. Shogun Godo had finally declared an embargo on SOLDIER, precipitating a shutdown of the local SOLDIER barracks, because he knew something was afoot. Diera was still groping her way towards it. "All right, I'm done. With the computer anyway." Silk snorted and flicked the monitor off, obviously skeptical. "Now, do you have any ideas _why_ Uncle Iri signed that dumb contract with Shinra?"

            Silk cocked his head. "How did you find out about that?"

            "I asked, Ashner, I asked. Ideas?"

            "Well..." his eyes darted about as he visibly collected his thoughts, "this is only a rumor. You have to promise not to tell anyone."

            "Promise."

            "It's only a rumor, but it's going around that…" his face was blank with the effort of concealing the uncertainty that leaked out past his cocky mask, "the Shinra man backed the boss into a corner and stuck him neatly as a butterfly to cork."

            Diera made a indelicate sound. "Nonsense! Uncle Iri is the sharpest codger in the world. He wouldn't be beaten by some pen pusher."

            "I don't know," Silk said quietly, his foot tapping uneasily. "I don't know, honestly. I can't trust him like you do."

            "Uncle Iri's always been the best. That's why he's the Leader, isn't it?"

            "But there was a Leader before him, doesn't that sort of mean that there was someone better?" Silk pointed out with dogged hopelessness.

            Her jaw jutted stubbornly. "He's the best. He has to be."

            Her mind was made up. Silently Silk said in the stillness of his mind that she was dead wrong, but she hadn't had the chance to learn the instinctive paranoia, the suspicion, the wariness that the normal Turk had. She lacked the ability to question orders in the normal way. And, for her sake- for all their sakes- he hoped that she was right. Because he didn't exactly feel like dying just yet.

--

            Diera's stay within the Cosmo Canyon base lasted so long, she was chafing at the unaccustomed surroundings by the time Hurst next summoned her to his office. Raised in the sharp, businesslike environment of the Corel base, she couldn't get used to the rowdy, boisterous camaraderie of the Cosmo Turks. Her reaction to their overtures usually ended up in a fight, but she spent most of her time in the physical training facilities anyway. Nobody voiced any concern. Nothing to worry about, right?

           Anyway, the first order of business was to inform the weedy-looking young Turk that her suspension was being lifted, though another suspension would readily be enacted if she crossed the lines again. Diera looked distinctly relieved at this turn of events, since she could then be allowed (presumably) to return to her mother base (Corel). She was content enough to listen calmly to what he said next.

            "In accordance with your progress concerning mental and physical skill, I have approved your promotion."

            Her jaw dropped.

            "Close your mouth. Diera Raistlone, take your Valken." He nodded expressionlessly at the larger, chunkier-looking model that lay on the edge of his desk like an unlikely hunk of so much metal. It was a bit of a problem to aim and packed a hell of a recoil, but it also packed a demon of a punch. "Leave your Bolt in its place, and remember that a promotion of this sort does not bring any special concessions. You will still be expected to maintain a certain standard of work, if not a higher standard. Do I make myself clear?"

            "Uh," Diera affirmed, still slack-jawed with shock. She laid her old pistol hesitantly beside the new one and tested her new gun for balance. "It's… a bit off," she muttered, torn between hushed respect and demanding why this was so. Hushed respect seemed more prudent. "Um… do I go to the weapons department for a fitting holster?" she ventured, holding the new acquisition against her old hip strap. 

            He nodded once, slowly. She bobbed and, toting her new weapon, fled. 

            The district commander picked up his PHS and dialed an old, well-known number. 

            _"Hello, Jimmy's Donuts, what flavor do you want-?"_

            "It's me. Why Jimmy's Donuts?"

            _"Oh, YOU.__ The name sort of helps to keep junk calls down. I even deliver donuts to people who want them. Cool, huh?"_

            "Rotten ones, probably."

            _"I did say I wanted to keep junk calls down. What's the occasion?"_

            "The princess has just run off with her new toy. Are you sure this is a good idea? She's only prepubescent."

            _"Of course she'll be fine. I chose her, after all."_

            "That's not saying much."

_            "Oh, stuff it, will you? And don't call again unless you have something real to tell me about."_ The line went dead, and buzzed. Hurst switched it off without so much as a twitch of his eyebrow. He was used to all this. You don't get to a big fish position without getting used to the idiosyncrasies of your boss.

-----

Author's note: It's been a long time since I updated, huh? Still in the process of revamping this novelette. Why doesn't ANYONE review this monster? Is it that bad? I didn't think so… at this rate, even flames would be welcome… (sniffle) Come on… review… you know you want to…


	8. Just Sure

Colors of War, Chapter 6: Bet Your Soul On This

            Promotion felt like nothing, she thought blurrily as she brushed her teeth and got ready for bed. It still carried with it all the problems of having low rank, and there wasn't any opportunity to _do_ anything. On top of that, she'd forgotten to ask Hurst for permission to return to Corel. Oh well, there was always tomorrow.

            _Power.__ If I had power...if I had power…_

            That was silly. She had power… she had the Mako. Wasn't that enough? Vincent was always telling her that brains mattered more than killing.

            _Power enough to rule…_

            She berated herself as soon as the thought drifted to the surface of her mind. Who was better suited to the job than Uncle Iri? He had The Voice and The Presence. Things that made people obey his orders, though she hadn't quite figured out why. It was a force to be respected. Certainly she had no idea how to do things like that, though she had often thought that life would be simpler if only people did what she wanted them to. 

            Shaking her head at the silly thoughts that kept blooming like weeds, the young Turk stripped off her bra and slipped into bed. 

--

            …stars…

            Stars…

            Stars, stars, stars. An endless expanse of stars.

            Dead stars.

            I come and drink from each pool of life, and all places are mine to hold.

            (mine/yours/his/hers/you?)

            A puppet, just a puppet given to me by the forces that reign over sky and space. Many, many puppets. 

            (nopuppetnonotapuppet)

            They bind me, and I am halted, but I am a force of nature; I will not be denied. They talk of peace. I do not understand. I drink them.

            (killdeadalldeadwhereami)

            Their memories teach me of this thing called 'human', this thing called 'Cetra'. They teach me of 'hate', 'anger', 'fear'.

            (somanymindssomuchPAIN)

            I am the Starsnuffer, the death of planets, and I will win free. 

            (whereisthiswhoareyouwhatareyouwhyareyoudoingthistome)

            And you humans are going to help me.

            (NO!)

--

            She jerked in her sleep but did not fully awake. 

Tossing sweat-damp hair out of a hot face and turning over onto a cooler patch of the bed, she dreamed again.

--

            _Are you ready?_

            They stood together at the frozen place, the place of knowledge, the scar of the Planet, faceless. And she wept. He knew what must be done.

            _We need time… we need more time._

_            We don't have time. _He gave her a brief, awkward hug, as much for warmth as for comfort. _You know that as well as I do._

            She shivered, and it had nothing to do with the blizzard that raged about them. _It's too soon. The seal should have held it far longer._

_            It's been a long time since we sealed it up, Ifalna. And we're the only two left._

She gripped his arm as his gaze shifted to the faraway threat, suddenly afraid for his life. No- afraid for what must come. _You'll die. It'll kill you._

_            Its arm is not yet that long. And humans are notorious in their greed for weapons._ In spite of his firm tone, disgust tinged it.

            _The weapon might die, and all our work come to naught._

_            If we die, we die, and the Planet dies with us. The Cetra do not allow such things to happen._

_            You're really going to do this? What are you going to make it from?_

_            We've discussed this, Ifalna. Your blood and mine, and a newborn will suffice. This must needs be done swiftly._

They stood together at the beginning and the end, one and two, and cast their defiance in the face of their ancient enemy.

            _Are you ready?_

--

            Diera jerked half-awake, startled by the question that she knew, oddly, had been addressed both to her and yet not to her. Rubbing a hand across tired eyes that felt strained with all her troubled dreams, it came away dripping wet, tinged with a rusty color that showed up brown in the harsh electric light of the CC base fittings. She touched the pillow; it was stained pale brown. A smell hung in the air like something vaguely remembered. 

            She was sweating blood.

--

            "What is it you're worried about?" the hawk-faced medic inquired shortly, plainly not pleased to be woken up before dawn with the terrified screaming of a young girl. He wasn't the only one; she had roused the entire corridor by shrieking like a wounded chocobo. Diera could expect a request to return to Corel fairly soon, she felt sure. A good thing in the midst of all these bad things. All these mystic…

            Mystic?

            The Elders, she growled mentally, biting down hard on the rim of the paper cup that the medic had provided for her. They had to be behind this. She'd dissed them rather personally, even if it had been justified; this was their petty revenge. Well, see if she'd give them the apology they wanted! Nasty old men and their grudges!

            And yet… the dreams had not been… her own?

            "Give me a pep, and I'll leave you alone," she offered at last, realizing that her medic had repeated his question for the last five minutes or so. "I promise."

            He looked suspiciously at her. "You're sure you'll be fine?" Obviously he noticed that she hadn't answered his question. 

            Deciding that the truth was harmless enough, if it did sound silly, she told him, "It's just bad dreams."

            "It's your health on the line," he shrugged dismissively, going to his drug shelves and shaking some white capsules into a plastic sleeve. "Try not to rely on these. If you get hooked, I'll supervise you in the cold turkey myself. You hear?"

            She waved a hand equally dismissively, relieved to find that she wasn't sweating blood anymore, even though the traces had dried into a rusty crust on her skin and in her sleeping shift. "I'll be careful. D'you think I can stay on active duty today?"

            The medic looked up in the midst of a yawn, scratching a hand through sleep-ruffled hair. "It's not contagious, I don't see why not."

            "Thanks, Uncle Justin." Deciding to take a morning bath since dawn was hours away, she ducked out into the corridor, leaving the medic to record her prescription down in his logs. He finished signing next to the line, and thought about this new case, perplexed. Sweating blood wasn't unheard of, but it was a very rare ailment, brought on by extreme fear, worry, anger and other negative emotions. Certainly it wasn't something that could be explained away by a child's nightmares. 

            The boss was going to hear about this whether Raistlorne liked it or not. He thought a silent apology to the girl. He'd sworn oath, after all. 

----

Author's note: Deutrinium took a long time, and Just Sure took me just two days. (sighs) I'm inconsistent. If this chapter seems shorter, it's so I could steer the story back on track and on schedule; right now it's following my timetables quite nicely. As before, please review! I'm starved for reviews… 


	9. Judges

Colors Of War, Chapter 7: The Right, The Wrong, And The Dead

            "What? I'm to go to the boss again?" Diera pulled her tie knot down, tugging it loose. It wasn't that she wasn't fond of the Turk uniform, but the tie was a chore that she had yet to get used to. Why'd she get stuck with this stiff get anyway? Oh, strike that, she already knew. It came with that promotion. She was really starting to hate that promotion. Since when did her nice comfortable working clothes interfere with her work standard? "D'you know why?'

            Silk raised his hands in the classic 'search me' gesture. "Not my bad."

            Shooting him an unpleasant glare, she gave up on the blasted tie and stormed off to see what all the fuss was about. 

--

            "You're putting me in quarantine over NIGHTMARES?" Diera repeated incredulously, throwing up her hands. "Come _on_! Forget what Uncle Justin told you, okay? It was just dreams. Just dreams. It's not catching!"

            Gemmell Hurst eyed her expressionlessly from his imposing leather chair. "People don't sweat blood over nightmares, Raistlorne. Healthy people certainly don't have cause to yell the medical quarters down over nightmares. You are not in working condition. Follow orders and return to Corel to receive your medical leave."

            "I want to _do_ stuff!" she objected, almost in tears. "I don't want to sit around in a hospital somewhere!"

            "You'll get work when you're ready for it," he replied sharply, slapping one hand down on his desk for emphasis. "At the moment, you're at risk of losing your recent promotion. Leave immediately!" His tone brooked no contradiction, and she slunk unhappily out, defeated. 

--

            Silk saw her packed and on a chocobo, fuming and swearing to hide the moisture that brimmed in her eyes. Iridalan hadn't chosen his partner falsely- the older teen teased her unmercifully, but he knew better than any outsider what his oft-unseen partner-to-be was feeling. Partnership bond, one might say. Whatever it was, at the moment he was just worried that she might do something foolish. 

            "Are you sure you'll be fine?" he said worriedly as she jerked the reins sharply right, startling the blue bird and causing it to wark in disapproval. 

           "That's the fifth time you asked, you stupid git!" she snapped tearfully, scrubbing furiously at her eyes with one sleeve. "Of course I'm fine! Hurst was being unfair. Just because I'm the youngest member on the force, he court-marshals me over some silly excuse! And I've already gotten medication!" He passed her a handkerchief as she sniffled wetly, and the girl accepted it with sudden glumness. "Now it's blown. How'm I going to stop having nightmares?"

            "You really do need a rest break," Silk muttered with equal glumness, recognizing the old rant. While he had been repeating his concerned questions, she had been replaying her dissatisfaction and despair, with little difference in every repetition. It had the taste of a grudge by now. "Look, princess, it's his job to cut back on risks. If he thinks you're a risk, of course he's going to make you take a break. You've been chafing all the time anyway- maybe you need to get out for awhile. Get a tan, a boyfriend. Something like that. Just don't brood over this all the time."

            Diera blew her nose noisily and wiped it, then stared down at him with a distinctly guilty expression. "I'm sorry. D'you want your kerchief back?"

            He sighed. "Burn it. I'm going to give those new Shinra tissues a try. They seem awfully convenient. Cleaner, too."

            "Are you saying that just to irritate me?" she said annoyedly, piqued at the very mention of her pet peeve, and blew her nose again. "Shinra's a no-good bunch, mark my words."

            "Good they might not be, but the tissues do sound good," he returned without rancor, and smacked the chocobo's tail. Diera squawked in surprise as her mount leapt off down the canyon passageway, energized with a sudden burst of frantic speed, and barely managed to control the bird as it charged past numerous rocky outcrops. Silk grinned as she left behind a screamed epithet attached to his name, and went back into the base.

            She would be just fine. And with any luck, she'd take his advice. It hadn't been _all_ nonsense.

--

            It took her a full day to pick her way across the Gongaga fords, and a heavy rain caught her at dusk. Her bird liked the water; she didn't. With all due speed, and grimacing at the mud that spattered over her nice new uniform (minus tie), she hurried her mount to Gongaga Town. 

            It had recently come under Shinra's circle of influence, small backwater though it was, and a large reactor was under construction there. Diera spat at it as she rode past the lane that would eventually give passage to the metal monolith. _Filthy Shinra,_ she thought darkly, distracted from her resentful gloom. _Filthy bloodsucking druggie Shinra._They were eating up the world, squeezing out competition. Shinra Energy, Shinra Weapons, Shinra Computers, Shinra Food, Shinra Health, Shinra everything. The information network was starting to shift now, as informants lost their old line of work and were reabsorbed into the new nexus of power. The worst thing was, Shinra had started out as a weapons company and their talents leaned heavily in that direction. The auxiliaries were of considerably inferior stock than their mainstream, except for their vaunted superenergy. 

            Change the world, indeed. They were going to, what was the word, militarize it. Make everything uniform and bland and tasteless. She hawked and spat again, disgusted with their burgeoning ambition, and urged her mount on to the creature comforts of the township.

--

            Gongaga was… small. 

Even using 'backwater' to describe it wasn't exactly an insult. Out-of-the-way and content to remain that way, the people of Gongaga were a quiet, unassuming lot, content to remain a subsistence cultivation area. (It was so small that the Turks didn't have an office there, though of course one or two of the villagers were on the informant payroll.) Of the few things they were known for, intimate neighborhood was one, and village-wide celebrations was another. Birthdays, childbirths, marriages- even coming of age was celebrated, where it had become nothing more than a fond memory in the larger, more advanced townships. 

Turks sometimes threw parties there, since the folk were all too ready to help out with the supply and preparation, parties to celebrate the graduation of the new additions into the main force, or the promotion of a new District Commander, or some such important occasion. Diera herself had memories of being tugged along into a wash of people, then corralled by a familiar arm as a crowd of other kids- how old had she been then?- ran past them. Vincent had never let her play with other kid when she was small, and she'd resented him for it then. 

            Looking back on those times from the lofty age of ten years, give or take several months, she found that Vincent had directed her down the path that led to work, their kind of work. Other children had time to play because they hadn't found what their aim in life was yet; hers had been decided when she was just a baby, and Uncle Iri had primed her like a single bullet in a game of Contresieran gun-roulette. Play, for her, had been typing lessons, weapons assembly lessons, all the myriad fun training lessons that could be made interesting for the sake of a tiny hyperactive girl who had attention span problems. It had been fun, or at least she had the general idea that it was fun. Nothing beat hacking. Now that was fun. You could do all kinds of interesting things with people's personal information. 

            Ah, well, back to the subject. 

Or maybe not. 

Since she was currently huddled shivering in someone's armchair, her feet submerged in some dreadfully hot solution that smelled horribly like mustard, wearing borrowed clothes and bundled in a thick towel, there really wasn't much interesting about her situation. Really. 

The elderly couple that had literally dragged her off the drenched streets puttered busily about, aided by a tallish, punky-looking young man with shoulders broad enough to balance folders on. His name was Zack, she had found out some time back (since the elderly couple (in their forties or something) kept calling him by name whenever they needed him to hold something) and, from the general… smallness… of the room, she surmised that he was an only child. 

Despite her general state of ill feeling, she'd had an instant of electric recognition as he opened the door to let his dad pull her in. _This is HIM_. He would be perfect for SOLDIER. Absolutely. Now how to get him on the next recruitment roll? Gongaga generally didn't give recruits. It was one of the curious little exceptions that made sense if you thought about it; cut back on the help and the parties go down in quality. But with all the pressure from Shinra, the Turks had stopped partying quite so hard. At least, she didn't remember word of any such event being noised about in the five years since the last party. In any case, it would be… a bit of work to convince someone high enough that her opinion was trustworthy.

And then… there was that little problem of convincing ANYONE at all that her opinion was to be believed at all. Hurst probably had her 'illness' plastered all over the notice boards by now. She gurgled a mournful sigh and sank deeper into that tub of mustard mixture. There was a bright spot to this, though. Silk could do it for her. At the moment, annoying as he was, he had the clout to do it, and he still believed her. Right. Problem over. She sniffled into Silk's much-abused handkerchief and wondered how Zack would react to the news that he was being nominated for SOLDIER by a girl several years younger than he- maybe half his age, actually. Fun, fun. 

"Hey, you… what's your name?" Said teenager dropped to a crouch beside the armchair, his bright blue eyes alive with the energy that made him seem so much more real than the other sleepy, soft-edged inhabitants of the village. She stared at him, her thoughts skittering down the paths that training had carved into her mind, filled with projections and speculations. He could be so much. So much more.

So much less.

She envied him that.

"You all right, kid?" he was saying worriedly, patting her face with big cool hands. "You feeling alright?"

Irritable at his unwelcome concern, she swatted at him. "I'm fine." He looked startled, and she realized that she had slipped into the language of the adults, the language that she had grown up speaking. Vincent had taken pains to break her of 'baby language' early on in her education. It was hard not to speak in the simple, workable language that seemed so much more sensible, now. But one must make some sacrifices. Trying not to feel like a total idiot, she toned down on the curtness and turned up the cuteness. "I'm sorry. But I'm okay! Really!" He didn't look convinced. She couldn't blame him. Hard to sound okay when your throat sounds like the slime from hell. But she tried her best. "I'll be fine."

"Aren't you lucky I'm not buying that?" he replied amiably, apparently satisfied that she was nothing more than physically sick. Of course, Diera thought glumly to herself, he hadn't proved her mental health either. Well, maybe it was lucky for her that he chose to overlook that minor fault. He wasn't batty dumb the way some of the Bashers in Contresiera were, but he was seemingly expert at pretending that everything was dandy. She realized this when he carefully laid a hot mug of cocoa in her trembling hands. "Here now, we'll have the doc in to have a look at you when the rain's let up. Drink slowly."

Drat, he'd seen through her act. That one slip had been enough, so her initial assessment of him, at least, was more or less accurate. Talk about the lining on the cloud. She mouthed something grumpy in the direction of his back as he bustled off to do something else, weaving around and among his parents like he had some sixth sense of where they were, some internal music they all danced in perfect harmony to, because they never collided. She watched them and wasn't sure she could have done the same. She was a personal space hog, as Silk had once commented in that annoying big-relative way of his. And all this irritated her. She settled down to fume at the world in general and drink her cocoa. 

And then, she wasn't exactly sure when, she fell asleep, and dreamed.

--

            She stood in a large, empty space. One moment it was filled with flowers, the next it was a grassy green flatland, then a rocky crag, then some other kind of terrain, shifting and restless, never really distinct. It was like a flickering fog that refused to go away.

            And then the fog froze solid- she felt a cold sensation running down her chest- and rearranged itself into a chess field. A really, really big chess field. She was dressed in some kind of antique black outfit, holding a long, narrow staff tipped with onyx and ornately carved. And she was alone, a dot of black in a ragged sea of white.

            She felt later that she should have fled screaming, but right then it didn't seem important that she was the only one of her side left. It was only important to survive, to live just a little longer. Gathering the skirts of the antique Contresieran-styled gown in one hand, she clanked her way across the board on the awkward heeled shoes, using the staff as a glorified walking stick, and kicked a white piece out of her way, taking its place. The huge marble piece wobbled, fell on its side, and shattered.

            A bloody, dismembered body rolled off the board, and she watched it fade into a white mist with distant, dispassionate eyes for only a moment, then she turned back to face the other white pieces. 

            The fight was not yet over. Not at long as she lived.

            And, as a Lancer bore swiftly down on her, the field wavered, and the dream changed, and she saw an empty sweep of stars.

--

            _Oh no. Not again._

            At that thought, the stars faded to grey, and gave way to an empty, barren plain; one terrifying in its simplicity. Tired wind raised clouds of dust that hugged the ground heavily, reluctant to rise and confuse the eyes. Everywhere she saw the scattered remains of civilization; no ruins stood, but here and there was the outline of a brick, the withered remains of a fruit tree, carved wood, things that indicated that people had once lived here. Something had destroyed this place, down to the earth; where it should have been choked by weeds, it yielded nothing, _not even weeds_. 

            Overtaken by an odd, tight sort of feeling in her chest, one that threw claws up her throat and swam liquid in her eyes, she knelt in the grey dust and scratched her hands through it, hoping to find something of the rich brown earth within. 

            Her hands scooped directly through the shivering dust, as if she had dipped her hands in the soft sands of the del Solan seaside. But where the beach had been warm, vibrant with the salty life that eked a living within its moist sands, this sand was like the sands in an hourglass, utterly inorganic. It held nothing, not even the odd grass root. There was no life here.

            No, she realized in the flash of insight that one usually only gets within dreams or hallucinations. _There was no life here, or anywhere._ It was all gone, dead, stolen away. 

            The clear, shining blue of the sky seemed almost obscene in comparison to the sad, lonely remains of the world. She had time to think of this final criticism before people shook her awake, and she had to get up and explain to yet another whitecoat that no, she was all right, yes, she would be fine with just some asprin. By then the dreams were nothing more than half-remembered nightmares, and she had forgotten what had inspired the unreasonable uneasiness in her heart.

----

Author's note: I said I was on schedule; forget that. I'm way off my planner by now. The story sort of writes itself, so I probably have a million glaring mistakes in this chapter that I haven't picked up on yet. (coughreviewcough) Well, Zack's made his entrance; now we'll see how Diera contrives to get him into SOLDIER. 

One of my reviewers commented on how Vincent was well-nigh the only recognizable canon character in the fic, and I'm sorry about that, but in the game there's just so much you can do with characters named 'shopkeeper' and 'Aimi' and all that. You'll probably be wading in original characters for a few more chapters, by when something really major will happen and most of them will suddenly… disappear… and we'll click back onto the canon timeline.

Can't give away too much, so you guys will probably have to stay tuned until the end of this monster. Keep those comments coming, people; I love you all. Even the flamers. 


	10. Ruthless

Colors of War, Chapter 8: Careless Hands

            Diera was up and about sooner than the doctor had predicted. He hadn't taken into account the strange chemical cocktail that Shinra's scientists had dribbled into her system, and she was content to let him overlook that minor detail. No need to burden the whitecoat with things he probably wouldn't understand. Zack might be able to handle it, but she had other plans for him.

            Besides, with the war that Shinra was currently cooking up, coupled with the enhancement program that SOLDIER was currently implementing, the world would know about enhancements soon enough. What they didn't know couldn't hurt anyone but the unfortunate country that Shinra selected for its object lesson to the world. 

            Diera had no particular fondness for anyone but her own, but the prospect of an entire country being crushed… much as her training protested against interfering in what must be a well-made decision, she had to go find Uncle Iri and somehow persuade him to default on the contract with Shinra.

            Yeah, right.

            "You're going already?" Zack said disappointedly, cutting into her dark reverie. 

            She snagged her mount's reins before it could scamper away and turned reluctantly to face him. In the short week she had been with him, he had squirmed into her affections. The boy (that was her impression of him although he was obviously more than a bit older than she was) had a knack of alternately looking soulful and cheerfully bossy that was hard to resist. "I'm going. I was supposed to be home long ago, and they were pretty upset when I called them last."

            'Upset' was putting it mildly. Uncle Iri actually threatened to give her a lengthy suspension spent in the oh-so-sunny Costa del Sol department. He actually seemed to think that it would be the most prudent course of action. _Please._ Of course, the del Solan department was known for its wealth of near-retiring age veterans, who were enjoying their last years, months, days in comfort before Uncle Iri gave them the writ of honorable discharge, or something like that. 

            (Whatever the 'writ of honorable discharge' (or whatever it was) was, the Turk dropped completely out of sight after Uncle Iri issued it. Like, no more contact, not even visual contact, no more communication. Once you weren't a Turk, you were _really_ not a Turk. No getting around that, at least not that Diera had ever seen or heard. Whenever she asked anyone about it, they just got really sad-looking and avoided the subject. She'd given up on asking after a while. Losing friends was always painful, she supposed.)

            She'd remembered that they weren't actually given immediate discharge because of their valuable knowledge. Turk ethics forbade the wastage of precious data in any way, shape and/or form, because their trade was in data and details. Killing was a sideline. Knowing exactly where the target would be at any given time was their true advantage. If she somehow managed to get all the information they had to pass on, further promotion was almost certainly guaranteed. She might even persuade Uncle Iri to give her a job. She _really_ wanted to test her skills on something. 

            "…Yo, kid- man, you're creepy…" He was waving one hand in front of her face, looking horrified. "You zone out so fast. You said you don't do that much? I don't buy it." She scowled at him and half-raised her foot in warning. Wisely he backed away. "All right, so you're going back now. So give me your address or something."

            Diera looked at him like he had suddenly sprouted bunny ears and turned into her backpack. "What do you want my address for?" _Not to mention that anyone could trace it if it got out. Vincent said so. Zackary isn't even a Candidate yet. _"Not to send junk mail, is it?"

            Zack looked injured, which was disturbingly cute for a gangling horseface. She quickly concentrated on her bird, which was warking with impatience. _Ignore it, ignore it. He's just another pawn. There's always another one to use. _"I was just wondering if we could be pen pals. I mean, ma and pa always want me to get out more, but there aren't many people my age around. Besides, you're flat, but you seem pretty grown-up."

            It took a moment for that to sink in. "Did you just say I was flat?" she repeated slowly, one eyebrow sliding upward of its own volition. "Zackary Horizon, did you just suggest that I was a flat grown-up?"

            He smiled nervously, obviously only now realizing that his comment had been somewhat tactless. "Uh- maybe. But I didn't mean it that way."

            She sighed, defeated. Zack managed to make all her pique melt away like cotton candy under tapwater. Hurst had squashed her arguments with the sledgehammer of authority; this bumbling _boy_ did it with a tilt of his head and a funny expression. _I have to work on mastering my emotions. I really am going to work on them._ "It's cool." _ I haven't used 'cool' in nearly two years. Vincent said it was unprofessional._ "I guess I am flat," she added, patting her chest. The medics had marked her for an early bloomer, but she was only getting the inches- the other female things had yet to show up. Oh well. "All right, you got something to take it down with?"

            He grinned with startling whiteness and whipped out a tiny pocketbook. _The little bastard._ She had to respect the deviousness of it all. Get her riled up, then toss in a cute look and get the address. What a Turk he would have made. _Hmmm._ She gave him one of the false addresses that the Turks used, which would be picked up weekly and redirected to the appropriate people. It was a tidy arrangement, especially when you didn't want people to know that you were a Turk. Messed up contact relations something awful. Uncle Lancir had come back swearing after a leak once…_Back to the job, Dia._ "There. You better not send any weird stuff, Horizon. They'll chew me out if they find any monkey business."

            Zack waved a dismissive hand. "Chill! Do you always use people's last names?"

            She gave him another 'bunny' look. "Is there anything wrong?"

            "Not really. It's just creepy, that's all."

            "Creepy?" Her forgotten eyebrow inched higher. 

            He reached over to tweak her nose. "Whoever raised you got to be cool, kid. You talk almost exactly like the coppers from those old theatre productions."

            "You got theatre out here in the ass end of nowhere?"

            "Hey!" Zack bristled slightly. "Well… I suppose Gongaga's far out, but you'll keep those smart remarks to yourself, kid." He showed her a large and somewhat threatening fist that she had every confidence of beating in a fight. But she wasn't here to get in a fight with him, so she let him have his moment. "We used to have a homemade theatre company staying here. They'd give us performances whenever someone threw a party." His smile became wistful. "They closed down a few months back. All their lead players went down to old age."

            "Ah," Diera said flatly. Old age was a mystery to her. She had no conception of the rationale that made people retire. So they got wrinkled, so what? Didn't affect their competency, did it? But people did it anyway. "So I talk like a copper." _Too close for comfort._ "So… see you around, Horizon." She swung up into the Chocobo's saddle, her performance interrupted only slightly by the bulky saddlebag that she had to clear with a lifted leg. All right, so it wasn't very graceful, but she managed to get it done without much more than a snicker from her self-appointed 'pen pal'. Giving him a cold glare, mostly feigned, she kicked her mount sharply and held on for dear life as it launched itself directly down the path leading out of the Gongaga area.

            Somewhere in the wind of her passing floated a yelled "Seeya, kid!". 

            She grinned to herself.

--

            The Corel Base was usually busy, but this was a new high. She couldn't even squeeze into the main office because of the sheer volume of people crammed into it, yelling in code to each other and waving sheets of paper around. Diera stood behind the wall off backs, hot and annoyed and feeling left out. Pulling the blue bird's reins lightly, she gave up on trying to enter by the main door and went to stable her mount in the town's stables. 

            Dressed in a set of clothes that Zack's enthusiastic parents had procured from a neighbor (since her own uniform had been soaked and ruined three ways to Sevenday), Diera blended right into the town life. Well, she lacked the ample bosom that the previous wearer had apparently been endowed with, but safety pins were a wonderful invention. Just an extra pleat on either side of her back and she looked as normal as any other girl. If your idea of a girl was one that was absolutely flat-chested. She'd hit the 150-cm mark some time ago, and by the bone-deep ache that accompanied her everywhere, things were set to continue growing. 

            Forced into washing up for the first time in months (due to her very thorough drenching in that blasted rain), Diera had grudgingly admitted that regular _hot_ baths did have their merits. She'd actually _seen_ the layer of accumulated dirt peel off under Mrs Horizon's determined efforts. Her skin was still Mideelan gold-brown, her hair still true black, but the skin was just a few shades paler than it used to be, and now her hair gleamed not with grime and grease but the true gloss of cleanliness.

            Oh, hell. She _liked_ baths now. Sure made her hair lots easier to handle. Although she was reasonably sure that it would fizz and crackle in Corel's colder climate. Dredging up a smirk at the thought of Vincent going 'bzzt' after a bath, she put an extra spring in her step and managed to grab the last stall in the local stables before a group of Contresieran travelers rode in. They swore good-naturedly at her; she called something acidic back in their bubbling language, and it was all right. They had to have been countryside stock; the city-bred ones took insults _very_ seriously. These ones acted like life was one huge ongoing joke. Diera personally agreed with them. Why take life so seriously?

            _Because life depends on getting out alive, that's why._

            She winced as the remembered reprimand rang ghostlike in her 'ears'. Vincent-damn-him had the strangest way of popping up where he was least expected. Even in her memories. Yeeeeesh. Shaking her head to try and put it out of her mind, Diera reached up and started unsnapping the buckles of her mount's halter. Stripping the tack took only a minute, and getting enough greens and grain from the storage bin in a corner took less than fifteen minutes. All in all, she was quite satisfied with her working speed.

            No, she didn't just walk off after that. Vincent had trained her in the courtesies of paying, after all. She even treated those Contresieran travelers to a round of beer, to apologize for stealing the last lot, and struck up a conversation with them. (No, she didn't drink either. It tasted funny. Besides, she'd never managed to get dizzy or even light-headed. It just made her go to the toilet a lot.) But that wasn't the point. The point was, these travelers were country nobles, and they were migrating from their motherland. 

            La Contresiera, the golden city beyond the Nibel Mountains, was reputed to be the Golden Land as well. Contresierans were all so ultra-civilized that they thought of any other land, town or city as inferior to their own. That was what Diera had heard from her uncles and aunts, including the Contresieran ones. It wasn't arrogance, or even pride; it was just hard to think quite so well of anywhere else once you had seen the lush green of their land and the archaic spirals of their fairytale architechture. (After visiting Contresiera, Diera had conceded their point.) In any case, Contresierans rarely left their country, and even more rare was the migration of a single noble family, let alone an entire group of young ones, heirs and second children who were highly prized by their nobility. 

THE POINT BEING, these were only the ones being told to move- right now- by their stern parents. How many others were trickling out, by sea and land route, for whatever reason? Not only the nobles- the peasants, too. La Contresiera had found out that they were in a hole deeper than money could fill. And, if Diera had the right of it, their doom would be at the hands of one of their own people. 

            Shinra.

            She chatted with them for some time, careful to nudge aside any unwelcome overtures, and dug for what she could, then left as they began looking for more mature female company. By then the sky had darkened to red, and she found herself needing the toilet fiercely. Teach her to match them drink for drink. It had seemed like a good idea at the time…

            When she tried getting into the office again, it was deserted. At least the entrance was. Not a light on. By the vibrations in the concrete- she blinked as it actually shifted a little under her feet- they seemed to have shifted their arguments into the depths of their mountain base. Nature called, however, too strongly to ignore. She hurried off to the toilet. It had nice acoustics anyway. Dimly, she could hear voices echoing down the air vent to the ladies' room, voices raised in argument. 

            Something big. About the Contresiera situation? She made her toilet call as swift as she could and, remembering the press of people from before, grimaced, reaching for the laces of the dress. Underneath them, she wore a tight halter top and shorts, her gear of choice lately. Good enough to crawl in dirt with. Which was exactly what her newest course of action entailed.

            Desperate situations, desperate measures. Phooey. 

--

            About two doors down from the main office area, which was where most of the paperwork got done, was a storage room, mostly used to store janitorial items. Yes, there were janitors among the Turks. Helped with infiltration. It was also a popular form of detention for green recruits. (She knew about it, having been on the receiving end sometimes.) In any case, the air vents from there connected to those over the office area. What better place to listen in if you couldn't get into the office proper?

            Here was to hoping that nobody else was listening from up there. 

            Knowing her fellow greenhorns, they probably had one or two up there with broadcasting apparatus. She grinned mirthlessly and put her folded dress in one of the cabinets, kicking off the girly shoes. At least she wasn't wearing socks. They would only get dirty, and climbing into a ceiling vest is a neat trick if you have socks on. _Never believe anyone who claims they can get up there in socks without shoes. Socks slide everywhere. You'd be lucky to get away with a bruised ass._ She grinned again. Uncle Jasson had been her infiltration tutor, a mousy-faced nondescript man with hands like a monkey's. He had been an expert in getting into unbelievable places. And if he said socks didn't cut it, she didn't want to test his theory. 

            The vent she was aiming for was conveniently spaced, right over a broom cabinet that was, even more conveniently, solid heavy iron and bolted to the wall. She climbed carefully up to the top, squeezed in the space between cabinet and vent grille, and pushed. It swung upwards with a protest of hinges, vengefully disgorging a load of dustballs. Diera hacked and coughed miserably, working her way up and into the vent. 

            Nobody had accessed this vent, this way. They hadn't come by this section of vent, either, not for months. If they had, there would be less muck up here. She snorted the worst of it out of her abused nose and crawled along the vent, feeling oddly secure in this close, two-way-only environment. The shafts were cut into the stone, and her passing raised no more than a few scraping noises. She could have pretended that the other people didn't exist, but the debate in the main office was heated, and drew her. 

Onward ho. She scrambled grimly towards the source of the shouting.

--

Author's note: I wrote down 'argument' in my story planner and now I'm stuck with it. This is going to be a key turning point in the story, so I need pointers from all of my three lonely reviewers. (begging) How do you take a bad order? How do you keep faith and ethics, especially if you didn't think you had ethics before then? How do you take down an argument if you arrive at the end if it? Is Diera turning out to be too unrealistic? Come on, tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

Oops, I seem to be giving away too much. Oh well. Someone review this thing? I need at least one more review to keep me going, especially since I've got something called Real Life and it's kicking me right now. To all those lovely people who reviewed- thank you. Really very much. And I hope you stay tuned to every new chapter of this monster.

Hermitcrabbing,

Akishira


	11. Sending

Colors of War, Chapter 9: Sorry Don't Cut It

            _"-you bastard, you knew this was coming!"_

Diera crouched just shy of the office vent grille, careful to keep from blowing dust all over the people below. There hadn't been anyone else up in her side of the vent system, which was nothing short of suspicious. Still, she ignored it in favor of listening to the heated debate below. Although it seemed to be winding up, things still seemed to be quite emotional. Now, just drop some nice juicy facts…

_            "You're right, I underestimated their ambition, but it's not like you love that hellhole anyway."_

_            "Stop acting like a goddamned ass, Iri! You're the one who keeps saying Turks have our own morals. Are you going to take it back?"_

There was a long, angry silence. Diera backed away, ever so slightly, even though she was well out of sight; the hostility seemed to overflow into her hiding place, it was so thick. Suddenly she knew why the other greenies weren't here. They'd been sent elsewhere, out of the way of their seniors' fight; to Cosmo Canyon, perhaps, for last-minute training for whatever it was that they were yelling about. All the battle-proven members had been called back to headquarters, but she hadn't known, because she had been caught sick. She'd called on the night of her arrival at Gongaga. The transfer orders must have come out when she was down with fever. Oh, damn.

            Finally, someone sighed, a loud, harsh sound filled with bitter frustration. _"I'm sorry. But a deal is a deal."_

_            "You're sorry?" _The other man seemed to be equally frustrated. _"Sorry doesn't cut it, Iri, sorry means nothing. You're the boss, BE a boss for a change! You're making a big mistake here, you fool. We'd all file for discharge once this job's over. That includes me. Who else is going to take my place? A Recruiter isn't trained lightly, and I'll take more than half the force with me."_

            Recruiter? It was the first she'd ever heard about that job. Did a recruiter induct people into the Turks? Didn't Uncle Iri do it himself? She strained to catch more of the conversation. Why was the Recruiter so important? Once the people were in the company, all loyalty went to the boss, didn't it? Then why was… Diera slid herself slowly to the edge of the vent grille, peering through the thick muffling dust trails at the heads below. She didn't usually recognize people by the tops of their heads, but it would help if a name was mentioned and she had something visual to go along with it. 

            Her nose twitched at the dust- and at a strangely familiar smell. Come to think of it, the arguing voices had seemed strangely familiar too. One was Iri, the other… she had heard it before, and recently too. This smell… soap?

            Oil?

            _Winter Doros_?

            Shi-iiiit. His albino white hair showed startlingly white against the blue carpet of the office. He was standing point at the crowd of dissenters.

            Winter Doros was the Recruiter. 

            She'd never known. Never even suspected. The Recruiter had to be someone who faded into the background? "Shit," she whispered, backing off. 

            _"I won't grant it, Doros, I'd do it over my dead body." _A heavy, realizing silence leapt upon Iridalan's heated words.

            Someone stepped forward, loafers scruffing the thin carpet. She was willing to bet that it was Doros, and it _was_ him who spoke next. _"I won't kill you, Iri, but you'll understand that death is the only way out sometimes. The only way out, remember? That's what you said when you recruited me. 'Say yes and you get the job; say no and you'll go to heaven.' No way out except death. Well, this is the last favor we're doing for you. After that, you'll have to clean up your own mess."_

            Iridalan laughed, a brief humorless bark. _"I always do it, don't I?" _He paused, and the silence was heavy, sad. Tired. _"It was good while it lasted, Doros. Now while everyone has their fricking orders, take them, grab some grub, and meet outside the town before dawn. We move when dawn breaks. Full fighting gear. Forget the uniform, tomorrow we dirty ourselves. It's not about Turk honor anymore. It's about showing the world that we can do what we said we would. You want to hate anyone, hate me, hate Shinra. When the three years are up, we bust their ass. Whoever's left after we finish this, I don't care who you are, remember that. Bust 'em. Pass that to the greenies when they come on. Understood?"_

            Diera backed away from the grille as Doros' voice rang out in a shattering roar, angry and thirsty. The people behind him took up the cry, and as she crawled as fast as she could, back the way she had come, she felt the rock of the ventilation systems thrum under her hands and feet. They were so angry. And she was going to get a piece of this cake before Uncle Iri disappeared into his office again. She had to.

--

            Uncle Iri didn't seem very happy to see her. In fact, his first words were, "What the hell are you doing here?"

            She gave him her best innocent look. It had taken her ten minutes to calm herself down this much, to be able to shift her expression the way she wanted to. Ten years of training and one might think it would be easy, but it wasn't. "I wasn't updated enough." Which was _technically_ true. "You didn't tell me about this when I called. In fact, you specifically told me to come to the headquarters, quote, 'ASAP', unquote. So," she smiled brightly at him, "I'm in on your little fix now. Feed me."

            He stared at her with tired, dead eyes that held the echoes of an anger not so long past. "This isn't a game, girl."

            "I didn't say it was." Silly of her to get defensive, but she did anyway. All the projected cheer leaked away like water out of a broken cup, leaving something tight? wooden? _trained_(that was what it felt like anyway), on her face. She was trying to climb the ranks of fishdom, dammit. "I didn't say it was a game. I'm not with the greenies in the Cosmo area. I'm here, Uncle Iri, and I want in on your little do. It matters to me."

            His eyes went cool, hard. "And just how old are you? How much experience do you have? None, girl, nothing to prove that you can do it."

            "I don't need to prove myself, Uncle Iri. All you need to know is that I can do it. I will. I heard all about your mess," she crossed her arms, lightly skipping over the fact that she hadn't yet found out_ what_ they were all worked up about. "I want a job. You got a job. I'll do it."

            Iridalan laughed suddenly, and Diera involuntarily took a step backwards at the look of absolute darkness that closed tight over his face. "You'll regret this later, girl. You'll regret it, and remember me, and hate Shinra. Have it your way, then- the orders are on my desk. There should be a copy of it somewhere, and you'll find it by the date."

            "Tomorrow," she said softly, glancing down at last. She'd never been able to out-stare Uncle Iri, not even when it hadn't been serious. Now it was serious, and she was discovering that she wasn't as advanced as she thought he was. It was not a comforting discovery. "I'll be there tomorrow. We going on foot?"

            "On Chocobo. You have a mount, don't you?" There was only tiredness in his voice now, like the debate had sapped the life from him. 

            "Yeah, I do. And Uncle Iri…" she raised her head, allowing a thread of uncertainty to creep into her voice, "what happened to Vincent and Uncle Lance?"

            He looked at her, his face devoid of emotion. "What makes you think something happened to them?"

            "They weren't downstairs, and Vincent would have gotten in your face for whatever reason. Since he's not here, and everyone else is here, something must have happened. Or did Shinra refuse to let them go?"

            Silence again, thick and horrible. Iridalan stared at her, his jaw working as she stared back and thought of a thousand different scenarios. But nothing could soften the blow as he said, finally, "MIA. Both of them. Shinra doesn't know where they are. No guns recovered. They just disappeared off the face of the Planet." Diera's mouth opened, closed, and she went through another few more rounds before giving up and keeping her mouth shut. "You were with them until recently, but not recent enough, so you wouldn't know what happened-" He stopped as her mouth firmed, and she went over to rummage in his desk. "Do you know something?" he demanded suspiciously, blocking her as she went for the door. 

            "I'm not sure. Move, Uncle Iri." She shoved him aside, revealing for once the enhancements that she kept under wraps, and left in a small storm of black. 

            It was too pat. Too coincidental. But nobody could tell, not with Hojo around.

--

            Much as it was tempting to stay up late and find out if her theory matched, she was tired, and tomorrow would be a long day.

            She couldn't sleep.

            The orders had been simple: Destroy La Contresiera, down to the last baby. 

            It was burned into her brain, words edged in fire that showed up on her eyelids when she tried to sleep. It was unreasonable, brutal and irrevocable. And she knew that Shinra was entirely capable of it. They already had money, power. What they needed was _land_, lots of it, and the reputation to keep other townships or independent territories from springing up. It was only sensible, but as she lay in the darkness and pieced together the pieces of this awful puzzle, she knew why her seniors had argued all day.

            Because she knew that if she did this, something in her would break. And this was just one of the small steps on her way to bigger, better, whatever.

            Her last thought as she fell asleep was that there would never again be anything more impressive on her résumé. 

--

            It seemed as if she woke up just after she closed her eyes- the alarm clock was ringing, her neck was stiff and she really didn't want to wake up, but her standing within the Turks depended on this. She was in her old room again, the tiny cubbyhole she'd grown up in, and though it was cramped she had the pick of her own limited closet. Black slacks, halter top and denim jacket was the order of the day, plenty of room to hide the long slender dirk that was her weapon as a fledgling, and the heavier Valken that she was required to carry for ID purposes. Extra knives, of course, and extra bullets, but over the smell of metal and gunpowder was the acrid taint of something else, nervousness and guilt.

            _It's not a game. It never has been. What's wrong with me now?_

--

            She managed to get her mount and scoot out to the town gates half an hour before the deadline, catching the main movement of her seniors. A good thing; most of them looked at her in disgust and an argument started over whether minors should be allowed on missions like this one. Iridalan gave her an exceedingly dirty look that she did her best to ignore, but she kept her mouth shut and eventually she was allowed to go with them. Most of them simply forgot about her. Uncle Iri didn't. He gave out job allotments in a voice meant to carry, virtually announcing her portion in a bellow.

            He'd given her a share of the dirtiest work. Once the drug had passed through the city's water systems, they would go in and slaughter the sleepers, and she was to be a part of that termination force. Iridalan's vengeful look in her direction was enough to say, you wanted a job, fine, here's the deep end. She felt vaguely nauseated, but there was no backing out now. 

            In streams of three and four they slipped past Nibelheim to gather near the Golden City, seeking cover close to the mountain ranges. The advance party went on ahead, carrying the canisters of the drug solution that would mix with the water in the city and reduce competition considerably. Diera took advantage of the lull to press up against Iri's mount, glaring at him with her own anger. He glared back, gesturing for her to rejoin her squad with an abrupt movement of his gauntleted hand. She shook her head shortly, giving a gesture of her own that was definitively crude.

            "I gave you what you wanted. Don't complain!" he hissed as the others around them politely moved away.

            "Why the drug? Why not just poison?"

            "Nobody would drink if they started all falling over dead," he retorted acidly. "Is that all? Are you getting squeamish?"

            Unable to stop herself, she snarled at him. Soft, but it was there. "You're pissed, fine, don't pin it on me."

            "It's my business," the graying leader snapped. "Now go and do your job. Don't get squeamish."

            Shortly she spat an angry sound and held her fist out. "Salute." He stared at her hand.

            "Who taught you?"

            "Lance. Hurry _up_." Reluctantly he clashed knuckles with her, then slapped the back of his hand against hers. It looked easy, but there was a trick to it, like hitting the target on a bell. If you slapped the wrong spot, the real Turk would know. Diera grinned smugly at Iri's suspicious look. "I'm here whether you like it or not," she called over her shoulder as she wheeled her bird and rode away.

            She missed seeing him look down onto the hand she'd slapped, eyes filled with sudden intent.

            If she _had seen, she would have hit him. Because Diera, above all, hated for people to interfere with her life._

--

            La Contresiera was rarely all silent. There was day life and night life, each taking over as the sun moved from horizon to horizon. But now, in the height of noon, everything slept.

            Diera drew her dirks as she followed her group in, her mind going curiously blank. She'd killed before, she told herself, strangely detached. This time would be no different. The group spilled apart, picking up speed; she headed directly toward the spires of the Palace. There might be people there who did not sleep, so it was the most likely area for resistance. Somehow… the thought of killing an opponent was less distasteful than the prospect of killing a sleeper on his or her bed.

            As Iridalan had predicted, there WERE guards- veterans from their grizzled look- who had not been drugged, but panic made them clumsy. Her seniors went on ahead as Diera gutted them deftly, leaving the reeking corpses behind her. Sleeping guards littered the path; she cut their throats with only a faint feeling of guilt. It was a job, and she was five all over again, being instructed in the intricacies of throat and gut. Her poniards bit and slid through skin, flesh, thicker things, hissing with the curious sound of metal in meat, grating as they met bone, cartilage. It didn't bother her to kill sleepers after a while, she discovered. Some part of her that said she should feel guilty, bad, ashamed of her actions, but it was like hacking through just so much meat, something like that. 

            Her seniors had disappeared. A trail of bodies and blood showed where they had gone. She went where the trails didn't, cleaning up on sleepers they'd missed in alcoves and closets. The thready wail of an agitated infant drew her into a richly, almost gaudily appointed room.

            It had a burbly red face, stubby body and small grasping hands, singularly unlovely though someone had swathed it in lace-trimmed cloth. She didn't like the effect anyway. And its voice grated on her brain through the grayish focus unpleasantly.

            It was just part of the job.

            The knife rose, fell, and the wail was quiet.

            She jerked backwards as the tiny body convulsed in its final throes, suddenly clumsy and horrible. The comfortably distance disappeared abruptly, and she smelled, really smelled for the first time, the blood and outhouse stench that coated her arms to the elbow, splashed liberally across her body, dripped down the point of her weapon. Her eyes fixed on the blood, saw the spasmodic thrashing of the still-warm corpse, traveled to the other bodies that littered the corridor outside.

            And then, for the first time in her working life, Diera Raistlorne screamed.

            But it was too late to regret.

--

            They found her in the Crown Prince's nursery, huddled against a wall, curled up in a tight ball and screaming her throat raw. Silk knocked her out and carried her back to the Turk encampment, dark circles highlighting his eyes; he had been ordered to kill his father. Gently. It couldn't be helped. Diera didn't know, didn't care. It was his own personal nightmare, just like every other nightmare that everyone else held deep in their bloodstained hearts.

            She never cried, only screamed. And she wasn't the only one. 

            Just the only one to scream out loud.

--

A/N: This took so long, I'm surprised anyone reviewed. But someone did! (jumps around waving pompoms) I want more! More! More! Vincent's out of the picture, so I can take liberties with the storyline. YES! (more pompoms) But never fear, the original character thing only continues for about two more chapters. After that, it's canon all the way… mostly. 

Teaser: Seph! Seph! Seph! 

Yes, I know it's not a teaser, but he IS making a stage appearance fairly soon. Go Seph! (dances away with pompoms)


	12. Kings

Colors of War, Chapter 10: Failure Means Giving Up

            The Turks were in lousy shape, the worst they had been ever since Cavall Turk founded the espionage company. Everyone was grim, depressed at the very least; Iridalan was particularly thunder-faced, and Diera missed the rest, because the medics (who had not, due to obvious reasons, participated in the fall of La Contresiera) shut her in one of the rehab cells and drugged her to within an inch of her life. Not necessarily in that order, anyhow.

            They discovered, fairly soon, that Diera went through drugs very quickly. Her system simply metabolized the chemicals too quickly for the effects to last more than five minutes, at the highest concentration they were sure not to kill her. So they settled for drugging her senseless and locking her in. She bounced back fairly quickly, but her madness was quiet rather than incendiary, a dreadful sort of stillness that suggested unmentionable thoughts and painful results. The medics switched off the surveillance lines after the first few days of nothing, preferring to concentrate on monitoring the other traumatized members of the force. 

            Diera had a long time to think, in the cold, sterile greyness of her temporary accommodation. Solitude does wonders for one's concentration. Or at least she thought it did. The truth made no difference. 

            The truth. Her mouth twisted, out of place on an adolescent body. She had seen the truth.

            People lied. The truth set nobody free, only bound you close and tight with chains and pain.

            _You want to be free?_

            :I _am_ free.:

            _No, you're just a puppet, like every other one of your kind. Poor, blind thing._

            :What do you know about it? Shut up.:

            _Oh, what I know about being imprisoned would fill all the minds of the world a hundred times over, puppet. _

            :You've done this before, haven't you?:

            Silence. Diera raised her head, her eyes bleak as she waited for the whispering voice to give an answer. She didn't know what or who it was, but it didn't 'feel' like one of the ultra-moralistic Cosmo Canyon people. No, this was amoral, hopeful even, just a voice of persuasion. It sounded a lot like her own voice; she was beginning to wonder if there WAS some truth in the Contresieran romantic theory of past life regression, after all. The only thing that rang false about this voice was the insistence of the thing to call her a puppet, which rankled. Even if it was her subsconscious speaking, she doubted that she thought of herself that way. So where was it coming from…?

            But did it really matter? :Who cares. I don't. Just following the orders is enough for me. I don't want to think, anymore…:

            _Is it really enough? Then would you follow an order _I _gave you? Are you prepared?_

:……who are you?:

            But the voice was silent.

            Diera sat on her thin lumpy bed, thinking.

--

            "Raistlorne? You okay now?"

            There was a long, thoughtful silence, then… "No." Her voice was muffled by her knees, and she was curled on her pallet, facing a corner of the room. "I'm not sure if I ever will be."

            The medics exchanged exasperated looks. Finally, one of them decided, "You can't be too out of it if you're aware of that, Raist. C'mon, There's a debriefing tomorrow. You should get cleaned up." The stout, iron-faced woman picked the girl up by her arm, setting her on her feet and gently shoving her out of the door. "It'll make you feel better about everything."

            Diera's look said plainly 'I don't think so', but she agreed to take the bath, chasing the anxious medics out as they tried to oversee her bath. She wasn't body shy, but this was a time for privacy. There was something meditative about sitting in hot water that smelled of mint and menthol, soaking out all the encrusted blood and thicker bits. Things really didn't seem all that bad. It wasn't the killing that bothered her, really; it was killing so many people in a short length of time. Or so her theory went. The obvious solution was to avoid killing from now on. As a Turk one couldn't really expect to cut out every trace of blood forever, but she could try. Surely killing one at a time wasn't too bad? 

            Hands dragged her from the hot water, and people were scolding. She pressed damp hands to her head, feeling as if the voices pounded a merciless path straight through her skull. Nausea curled in her gut, and someone dragged her over to the privy hole as whatever she had left in her gut spilled from her throat, hot and stinging. She retched until she had nothing left to expel, until her head spun and prickled with the onset of tears that she blinked fiercely back. Someone laid a shockingly cold wet cloth on the back of her neck and another pressed itself to her forehead, bringing a strange sort of clarity. Her stomach still ached, and she hurt all over, but she saw clearly for the first time in a long while. There were no operative Turks among the people who surrounded her, only medics. Karla Barichon, Jaysen Hati, Delia Manchester- recently recruited, not yet gun-holders, she thought dimly, pulling herself upright against the swirl and rush of the ever-present headache. "What was that?" she croaked, still tasting blood and vomit. 

            Delia eyed her narrowly, her tawny brown eyes intent. "You were in the water too long. Heat exhaustion." She lifted a vial full of some pale green liquid to Diera's lips. "Drink up. It'll put your stomach right."

            "Drugs?" Diera muttered hopefully, sniffing the open mouth of the flask. 

            "Nope. You run through them too fast. This is a herbal remedy, maybe you won't be sick in half an hour or so." Faintly disappointed, Diera obediently drank, making a face at the taste. "You know, you don't look thirteen at all," Delia commented absently, capping the flask and stowing it in one of the kits propped on the sink. It earned her a blank look from the younger girl. "I mean, really. Don't you know your own age?"

            "We aren't that big on birthdays, you know?" It was sarcastic, but laced with weak disbelief. "Am I really thirteen? Since when?"

            "Your birthday passed when you were in the cell," Jaysen supplied, "And the one before that you were at Cosmo Canyon, and the one before that you were at Nibelheim…" He trailed off at the expression on his (ergo) senior's face. "Hasn't ANYONE celebrated your birthday before? Other than just noting it on the records?"

            "Mostly with guns."

            Karla passed her a towel. "Dry off before you catch chill." For a few moments the medics politely looked away, letting a steadier Diera towel herself down. She groped for her underwear, Jaysen having to pass it to her, then spent half a minute trying to do the hook on her bra. Karla hooked it for her when a look of incandescent frustration settled on the too-young face, and all three older people backed away. Nobody wanted to take chances with a sick, angry Turk. It was usually detrimental for one's health. Right now, Diera looked on the verge of bursting into tears and wrecking the tiny bathroom. "Uh- Raist, you know the way to the bedroom, right, so we'll be getting along now." Hastily, the medics fled, towing their cases, and locked the door behind them.

            A scream of rage split the air behind them, angry, hating. They ran faster.

--

            The alarm woke her from a sodden, exhausted sleep. It took her several tries to find and smash the annoying device, but then memory returned- people pulling her out of the cell- and she knew it was time to tuck all the pain away. Pain had no place in a working society. She washed up again, in the shower this time, and changed into the comfortable tank top and shorts, fastening the holster of her gun firmly over her hips, and glared at herself in the bathroom mirror until she had regained an approximation of her former smiling self. Appearances were important. Very important.

            _An illusion you maintain to hide from yourself._

            The thought slid into her mind and was gone, but Diera scowled. The voice was back again. Damn. 

            Keeping her mind firmly on getting to the main office without breaking something helped to shut the suggestive, whispering voice out. And then she stepped into the office, and raised her eyes, and had to blink.

            From a thriving force of over two hundred seniors, at least, only about fifty or so remained, including Uncle Iri. Silk gave her a brief two-fingered salute, beckoning her to a seat beside him. Everyone looked grim, drawn. Angry. Haunted. Dangerous. "Shinra?" she whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer. Her world had crumbled so swiftly that Vincent and Lance seemed like a distant dream. 

            Iridalan's anger flowed around him, a palpable thing. "Shinra," he said meditatively, "has been a very bad man. He has just forced me to retire three-quarters of my qualified work force. I am so not pleased that it is. Not. Funny." Diera silently agreed. She had had many uncles and aunts among the working force of whom she was VERY fond, and most of them were gone now. How many places in the world were there for Uncle Iri to isolate the retirees? "Unfortunately, our contract is not up, so we can't storm his mansion and kick his ass." He started pacing the inside of their circle of seats, limping slightly. His silvering hair, cut close to his scalp, bristled fiercely, almost sparking with frustration. All eyes were on him, Diera included. This was their Leader, in the height of his fury. It was a majestic, somehow disheartening sight, because Iridalan never got worked up like this unless he was in deep shit. (This was discovered by looking at a few of the more senior veterans' sick looks.) "I wish I could say I knew how to get back at them, but I don't, so I want suggestions."

            "The nastier, the better," Uncle Arvill muttered, but there was no answering burst of mirth. It was deadly serious.

            Nobody spoke for some time. They were thinking, _if one of the sharpest minds in the business has run up against a dead end, what else is left?_ Then Diera remembered Hojo and Gast. "Is there anything stopping us from shoddy work?" she said quietly, looking around. Iridalan's stony glare made her wince. "It was just a suggestion."

            "Personal revenge is not an excuse to slack off, Raistlorne. I suggest that you learn that, quickly. No, what we want is to work around the contract…" Frowning and rubbing his chin fiercely, the Leader made a circuit of the chairs, stopping in front of his youngest Turk. Diera peered up at him, trying to anticipate his thoughts. "How sneaky are you feeling, girl?"

            "After Contresiera?" She bared her teeth at him. "Very. Do you need a poisoning?"

            "Tempting, but no. Shinra's expanded too much for us to just eliminate the heads. What we can do is outside of our contract." He started pacing again. "I've gone over the contract a hundred times. We're bound to serve the Shinra in any way necessary, to the exclusion of any other employers. That clause is really vague; it doesn't say anything about what we do outside service to the company, as a company. Thus, it is theoretically possible for us to run the odd job and work against them at the same times." Pausing, he scowled again. "The problem is actually doing it in such a way that they can't pin it on us even if they ask me directly."

            "So just 'ignore' anybody doing their private thing," Diera supplied, purple eyes alight with an absolutely evil gleam. "After all, we're only bound as a company… we have our private lives… and do they have any good idea exactly how much of our resources exist outside the official offices… you can truthfully say that you have no knowledge of a contract break. We're such honorless dogs, after all." Her sneer was artfully affected. "We don't report everything, so nobody will have any concrete evidence."

            Iridalan's grin was fanglike. "Smart girl. Now, use your discretion. And don't talk to me about this ever again. You all get that?"

            "Yes sir!" they chorused, smirking, and filed out. Diera remained in her seat, though. Iridalan frowned at her.

            She arched an eyebrow at him. "What?"

            "Isn't that my line?"

            "Nothing stopping me from staying, is there?" she replied defensively, rocking her seat back. "How about you? What're you going to do now that Doros is gone? Is the Recruiter that important?"

            He blinked. "Are you applying for the job?"

            "No. I'm too young. I just wondered, that's all. You never stopped me from asking questions, before."

            "That was before you insisted on growing up, whelp." The Leader gave her a quick, affectionate ruffle. "Why didn't you stay small and cute?"

            "Since _when_ have I ever been small and cute?"

--

Author's Note: I think I'm suffering writer's burnout. Nothing more frustrating than writer's burnout. Ye gads. Apart for that, I think my quality of writing has actually gone down exponentially. It seems to write like an especially horrible Mary Sue. (shudders) I need reviews! Is it as horrible as I think it is? And special thanks to SepSora for giving me two whole reviews! (cries happily) There, now most of the inconvenient fill-ins have  been done away with. We'll be entering normal canon territory from now on, and Seph should make his maiden appearance in the next chappie. Wish me luck!


	13. Gaiden 3: Killing Me Softly

Colors of War, Chapter 10a: Killing Me Softly

            La Contresiera is dead, truly dead. It's been on the decline for years now, almost as long as I've been alive… it would have fallen eventually… Shinra just made it happen faster, that's all…

            So why is my chest so tight? Why do my eyes burn and my throat squeeze up? 

            What… is this… in my eyes?

            Is this… tears?

            Is this feeling… sadness?

            No… Uncle Iri… calls it 'regret'…

            Regret for the soaring towers, regret for the yearning that stretched up into the sky, regret for the petty nobles who will never again play another round of their honor Game. Regret that I had a hand in silencing the city that never slept for fear of never waking up again.

            'Regret'….huh…

            I am… a Turk… my hand is raised on behalf of the one who commands my services… it's all I know… the fighting… I think if I ever stopped fighting, I would be indeed dead… But…

            But…

            Turks… are no one's pawns. 

            We accept contracts… and how we carry them out is our own choice… Did Frank Shinra tell Uncle Iri to extinguish every life in this burgeoning, overcrowded vista? Did they tell him that to his face…?

            Because… this is a great… what do the Wutai people call it? 

            A great 'shame'… yeah, that's the word…

            'Honor'… Most people don't think Turks have it… not even the Wutai, our closest cousins the ninja… maybe it's the way we do the things we have to? Or our ways of doing them? I… have my own 'honor'… the thing I absolutely swore I would not do… but haven't I done it here, now?

            My shame is stamped all over this smoking, crushed ruin. Shinra's weapons crumbled the walls, but it was we who aimed them, we who pulled the triggers. We cut the throats of the people, we poured poison into their food and drink, we cut them down as they tried to fight for their lives… man… woman…and….

            Those tiny hands… the hands reached up to me as I…

            I…

            This shame… Our shame… will not die… 

            Because I will carry its memory with me into the era that Shinra builds. I will remind them in word and deed… over and over… what we did. The Turks will be feared, as we have always been. And never again will we obliterate an entire people… never again will small reaching hands be bared to a naked blade. 

            This I swear.

            Even if I have to kill Uncle Iri… 

            Even if I have to kill Shinra itself…

            Even if the Turks depend on it.

            Never, forever.

**

Author's note: I felt really sorry for the people Dia slaughtered in the last chapter, so this is my stand-in eulogy for them. The quote 'Never, forever' comes from Diane Duane's _So You Want To Be A Wizard_, a quote used to describe the 'Starsnuffer', the Death of Planets. (No, it's not a pun and it's not literary collusion- I just thought the things sounded really cool!) 

No, I'm not going to write an explanation of Dia's actions. I'd rather analyse my work critically _after_ I finish writing it, thanks.

Yawn,

Akishira

Sorry for ranting. I'm just tired, and Dia's wearing me out. Hrrrr.

(Thanks to SepSora! Again! Because Seppy reviews! Yay!)


	14. Chronicles

Colors of War, Chapter 11: All You Have Left

            Two months after the fall of La Contresiera, the Turks finally got back in gear, with half a year left till they were free of Shinra. Things were tense within the offices. With the previous batches of recruits recovered and promoted to the working force, the unexperienced outnumbered the veterans, and Diera was not enjoying the responsibility of keeping her fellow greenhorns in line, because all of them were older than she was. With her time tied up in the normal surveillance and contact coordination work that had been newly redistributed among the surviving veterans, even poking her head out of her cubicle to yell for coffee was a chore, never mind breaking up the inevitable skirmishes that resulted from the meeting-up of several warring factions among the new graduates.

            "Revenge is a dish best served cold," Arvill quoted dully to her when she complained at the next staff meeting. "We wouldn't be able to stage any kind of prank right now, anyway. The mass retirement cost us more than we originally thought." _And don't we know it. _He crossed his arms as she sighed and put her head down on her own arms, echoing the beaten sentiment that filled the rest of the conference room. 

            "Damn, why can't we just kill the lot of them?"

            "Don't be an ass, girl, the public backlash…"

            "I think they'd cheer you in the streets, Uncle Iri."

            "That's why you haven't been promoted enough for your opinion to count," he retorted with perverse satisfaction. Diera gave him a single, disgusted look before consciously straightening her slovenly posture. Their relationship, not that there had been much of it in the first place, had soured to the point where their bickering permeated most of their conversation. Nobody felt up to taking them to task, even though they acted like juveniles. It took more energy than they had. 

            Paul Jennings, head of the Medic Department and interim leader of Biological Research, was perhaps the only one among them who looked like anything remotely resembling serene and well-rested. He did not, however, attempt to scold Diera or Iridalan. Just because he could, didn't mean that he thought it was necessary. He had more pressing things to worry about. Such as Shinra's Scientific Research Department, headed now by Kurayama Hojo, who had taken over the Department after the… unexpected demise of Gast. The Turks had expected Hojo to make his move after Gast fled with his Ancient wife, but they had not expected Hojo to somehow manage to kill every Turk attempt to infiltrate the 'recovery' SOLDIER detachment sent to retrieve Gast from Icicle Town. 

            They hadn't expected Hojo to kill Gast and take the rest of his family, either.

            Sometimes Diera truly thought the Turks had, like La Contresiera, seen their glory days past long ago. Everything had gone so far astray from the paragon of efficiency and knowledge that the Turks had used to be. But it was out of her hands now- maybe it had never been in her power to do anything- and she had to square her shoulders and concentrate on what Jennings was saying.

            "Shinra is pushing for the privilege of nominating Turk and SOLDIER recruits. In addition, Hojo has started to request that his first experiment be returned for follow-up tests. So quoth I," he added, nodding to a thunder-faced Diera. "His words, not mine."

            "I want that man," she muttered, grinding her teeth in a display of very unladylike emotion. "I want him dead. He totally wings me the wrong way."

            Jennings gave her a long, unfriendly look. "You have no respect for the sanctity of scientific advancement," the medic sniffed, though the barb was completely lost on Diera's sudden sharklike humor.

            "Oh well, by all means hand me to him. I'll show him what Lord Death looks like…"

            Iridalan's fist slammed the podium, once, and she flinched. "That's enough!" he snapped, earning startled looks and several reproachful glares. "Let's get to the meat of the matter. We are not going to give anything to Shinra that we don't have to, and unless Shinra produces someone really stunning, we aren't going to take their bloody suggestions either."

            "Well then," a silky, faintly nasal voice interrupted from the doorway, "would you consider this stunning enough for reevaluation of that comment?"

            Diera's head had turned before the strangers had begun speaking. She'd heard the beat of unfamiliar footsteps several moments before they arrived. And no newly promoted greenie would dare to approach the Conference Room before the red lights were out (signaling that the meeting was over) so it must be strangers. The steps had been unhurried. Her gun had been in her hand as she stared up at the interlopers.

            Valkrin Scarlett, Head of Shinra Weapons Research and Development, lounged indolently against the doorframe, neckline as plunging as ever, framed by a tall dark-haired man dressed in flowing black leather. (Even though leather was not supposed to _flow_ that way- was it calfskin?) Her artfully made-up face was twisted by gloating triumph. "Aren't we lucky that we have a brilliant scientist on our research team?"

            "Good afternoon to you, too," Iridalan gritted, teeth showing briefly as his lips tensed. "Diera, ease down. Scarlett? Get out."

            Diera did not lower her gun. She had settled into her preferred sitting stance, and it would have been a pain- quite literally- to lower her arm, only to have to whip back again if anything got out of hand. Though things were already looking out of hand. Scarlett's dark shadow had one hand upraised and facing towards her, metal shining over his leather glove, green pearls flashing in the light of Corel Base's old electric lamps. Both of them were glaring at each other, recognizing the real threat. Scarlett began to pale as she realized how close she was to the front line, but the woman had guts- she stayed where she was, trusting her bodyguard to protect her. 

            "A Barrier won't hold me off for long," Diera said coldly into the standoff silence, cocking her Valkren with her thumb. It was an unnecessary, overdramatic gesture, but it was also terribly effective. The sound it made was metallic and very, very final. Scarlett's brunet shadow didn't look very intimidated, though. Iridalan's eyes narrowed, to nobody's approval. Jennings was looking as if he wanted to strangle his Leader for even thinking of giving the blonde bitch (as most of them had labeled Scarlett) any leeway at all. Diera was still glaring at the man, who was glaring back. Mutual antagonism- or perhaps just two wild animals sizing each other up. Highly likely, though highly unflattering. "Are you her bodyguard?"

            His lip twitched in the suggestion of a sneer. "No. I happen to be the candidate she was sent to present."

            "Good," Diera smiled cheerily- and shot him.

            Faster than thought, he spoke a curt syllable, and blue light flared, catching the bullet. It still hit him low on the chest, inches from his heart, but only hard enough to maybe bruise; Diera looked vaguely disappointed that she hadn't at least made some sort of a hole on his person. Scarlett looked like she was going to have a heart attack- the bullet had bounced harmlessly off her candidate barely half a centimeter from her neck. Iridalan, on the other hand, seemed even more thoughtful. Jennings glared at him. "You cannot be in your right mind, if you're considering him," the medic growled. Diera's hand jerked up and she squeezed off another round, which took him squarely on the jaw with more force; the Barrier was fading, and this time she left a large purpling mark on the tanned skin. The blond didn't even flinch. "All right, so he's good, but the consequences-"

            "Oh, shut up if you're jealous," Scarlett snapped, stalking over to the podium where Iridalan stood. "Look, if you're going to be a mule about it, just take him on probation, however long it takes to convince you that he's the best SOLDIER you'll ever come across. And then think about this; we have the technology to enhance more qualified SOLDIERs to match this standard. All the company wants is to have a token representation of our capabilities-"

            "Do not test my patience, woman," the Leader snarled, mini-rifle aimed squarely at her diaphragm in an abrupt, rough movement. She blanched and walked backwards, matched step for step by the irritated, seething Turk, whose only change in aim was to straighten out his rifle, so that it would make a clean hole through her solar plexus instead of blasting her brains out. "I have taken so much shit from your darling President. I won't take your spy, and you can forget about threatening me in my own offices."

            Scarlett's blond shadow seemed to think otherwise. "Ice!"

            Diera twisted and ducked under the heavy metal stands of her lectern as ice cracked into being above her, spraying the vicinity with shards of ice splinters and causing the others around her to jump out of their seats to safety. 

            _I hate to _think_ this, but he pushes all my recruiting buttons._

            _I'm crazy. And if I don't concentrate, I'm also going to be dead._ Cautiously scrambling to the end of her row, Diera peeked above the desk ledge… and immediately threw herself down the theatre stairs as lightning lashed down where she had been, reaching for her with hungry golden fingers. Grateful for the carpeting, which cushioned most of the fall, she rolled, curling, digging through the battle fever for the words to activate the single materia she had been allowed to carry so far. "Frog Song!" she shouted, and the yellow materia in her gun burst into gleeful golden light.

            The room was suddenly filled with a lot of croaking.

--

            "That was so juvenile," Iridalan grumbled, typing furiously on his newly updated Luminos V0.2 computer keyboard. The Turks had cutting edge technology. Even Shinra was a few blocks behind. Only SOLDIER itself came close. Pride aside, he was currently writing the recommendation for Ragna's induction into the main SOLDIER force, and Diera was slouched on a couch opposite him with her own laptop handy, listening to him grouse with only half a mind. 

            Ragnarok. That was who Tall, Dark and Dangerous had been introduced as. Something about the name niggled in Diera's memory, but she couldn't put a finger on it, which was suspicious in itself. The Mako enhancements had touched her in a way she had not mentioned to any of the endless plethora of Shinra scientists who masqueraded as medics passing through the Corel Base. It had given her speed, higher endurance, perfect night vision and a regrettably sharp sense of smell, but it had also sharpened her brain somehow… given her photographic memory. (She'd once thought it to be the perfect cure for the wasting sickness that all older people seemed to fall prey to.) Not a good idea to mention it to Shinra, though. Better they should underestimate her. 

            Ragnarok. Some sort of ritualistic significance? Checks on Cosmo Canyon mythology turned up discouraging answers. End of The World. Period. Yikes. But Turks had gone through people with weird names. Just look at Cavall, he was named after one of the postures trained Chocobos could be persuaded to affect… and he had created the Turks. So, no shit, it wasn't grounds for immediate dismissal. Yes, she was still looking for an excuse not to hire him on SOLDIER. Unfortunately, she was coming up short. Of all the people who had been present at Scarlett's little introduction, only she and Ragnarok had remained humanoid. The rest had taken on the forms of upright frogs, croaking indignantly at her as she stared at an utterly unscathed Ragnarok. 

            _Bloody bastard had a Ribbon on him, the sneaky little genius!_ She couldn't help but admire the obvious detail that had gone into his personal armoring. Not many people thought to guard against the more ignoble spells that Enemy Skill materia could store. He could go so far in SOLDIER. She still thought he was a git, but who was asking her? Based on talent alone, she threw her vote his way. Based on gut feeling? Sack the man. But again, nobody was asking the most junior (age-wise) member of their (default) senior force. Being young had it kicks, but did people have to act so snotty about it?

            Ragnarok. No last name. No history. Fresh out of Shinra's labs.

            Suspicious as hell.

            "Uncle Iri, you need me for anything else tonight?" she said, setting her PC to power down. "I still have some stuff I need to get done."

            He barely looked up at her. "Give them hell for me, imp."

            She grinned. _This_ was the Uncle Iri she looked up to. "Yes, sir." 

--

            Squeezing into the innocuous lab-boy suit was hard after three years and a massive height difference (as well as the onset of puberty- thankfully, there was little evidence of mounds growing from her chest) which forced the Turk to rethink her infiltration strategy. Hmm.

            She discarded the lab suit as too troublesome, and picked up a janitorial suit instead. Slipping quickly into the heavy coveralls smelling faintly of sweat (filched from a laundry by the enterprising younger Turks) and twisting her thick, black hair into a firm, if slightly bushy ponytail, the Turk practiced a sullen, line-jawed middle-age-crisis look until she thought she had it up to speed, then pulled a thick gray woolen cloak from under her bed (shaking it out and sneezing faintly as a copious amount of dust was dislodged) and firmly covered herself in it, fastening it at the neck and using one hand to hold it shut. 

            Weapons had been added long before; a dirk to each thigh, easily placed for a downward draw via the knee, the slits so far down that nobody would ever bother to look. Her Valken was in a bellyband, nestled neatly in the spoon of her hip, for an easy draw between the heavy folds of her utility vest. She still felt conspicuously underdressed, but stealth demanded that she keep the clanking to a minimum. As it was, anything with the kind of hearing she enjoyed would be able to hear the steely slide of metal on leather with every step she made. Here was to hoping that Hojo hadn't modified a few Dobermans. 

            She threw together a saddlebag with some cash, extra firearms ('picked up' from the company supplies) and a few changes of clothing should she ever need to make a hasty exit, then slung the thing over her shoulder and hurried down to the local stables to cadge a mount from the Corellian keepers.

            "Haven't seen one of yours around for some time," the burly lantern-jawed bird handler grated amiably as she saddled a black bird (kept for senior use only). "Summat big happened lately?"

            "Ah- times do change," she agreed evasively, cinching the breast and girth bands firmly. In some part of her newly mature mind she decided that this must be why her uncles and aunts- her _colleagues_, she reminded herself firmly- had developed an annoying way of not-answering questions. Must have something to do with covering up embarrassing mistakes. "Uh- how about here? Shinra's been lobbying for a reactor here, right?"

            "Shinra!" The dark-skinned man hawked and spat disdainfully to the side. "Dirty rat bastards. They'll never build so long's Dyne's around, I tell you."

            "Dyne? Dyne Holland? The miner who married… Eleanor four years ago, right?" Her brow wrinkled briefly as she checked the information against her earlier recollections. The handler was nodding affirmatively, so she let the memories slide again. No need to expend energy. "No wonder he's so against the reactors," she added, hoping that her memories _were_ as accurate as she thought they were. "All the miners will be out of jobs if Shinra builds their reactors."

            "Aye, that's just a wee problem when most of the men here are miners, ain't it?" The handler made an indelicate sound that sounded like a cross between a chocobo wark and a dragon's belch. Whatever it was, it virtually reeked disdain. Diera filed it away for reference, since Iridalan was easily irritated by such sounds. It would be useful for fun later. "Shinra says they'll give us jobs, but it'll be a place of machines that need trained people. What can a bunch of old blackers like us do? Nothin', that's what. Bastards."

            Checking that the halter and reins were secure, Diera buckled her saddlebag to the back of the saddlepad and climbed into her saddle, shortening the reins firmly as the bird danced in place, anxious to be free. "Well, I wish you all the best of luck- but don't feel too bad if they build anyway. Thick forests like the Corel Range are like Gongaga, hard to come by- Shinra can't pass up a prime location like this. If you have to sell out, though, tell Dyne for me- sell it so high, Shinra won't believe it." They grinned at each other in perfect understanding, then the handler threw the stable doors open wide and Diera loosened the reins, allowing her mount to thunder dramatically into the mountain wilderness.

--

            Shinra may have had many offices, but its main lab, not the largest but the most intensely worked, had only ever been and would only ever be the one located in the basement of the Shinra Mansion.

            With the fall of La Contresiera, Nibelheim had become one of Shinra's most rampant outposts. A massive reactor had been built in the lush mountains, and copters whirred periodically to and from the town and the reactor. Security was tight, but not _that_ tight. The cleaners weren't monitored that tightly. Shifts were changed far too often for real relationships to form, and so she ran less risk of getting busted by security there. 

            SOLDIERs were all over the place. She thanked her lucky stars that she wasn't highly ranked enough for anyone to recognize her, all the while wondering _why_ they were so much in evidence. How had Shinra managed to negotiate such a thorough contract with Commander Kingston, who had a mind like a steel trap? Iridalan was a long shot, yes, but Kingston? She hadn't really met him directly, but the recruiting Turks virtually sang his praises every time she tried to find out about their ultra-macho sister company. Or would that be 'brother' company? She smoothed mirth from her face as she grabbed a cleaning cart and, twisting her features into a sullen, dissatisfied glower, dove gleefully directly into the fray.

            Getting into the lab itself was a bit of a chore, since Hojo seemed to be almost fanatic about the sanctity of his lab. Fortunately, not even Hojo was dumb enough to keep important documents in printed form around so many potentially destructive compounds. He _was_ dumb enough, however, to keep his logs recorded on the mansion's self-contained intranet. It made her life _so_ much easier. She chortled mentally to herself as, shutting herself in a dusty, empty room, she extracted her laptop from the rubbish compartment of the cleaning cart and set about hacking into the system. 

            She avoided trying to second-guess the scientists' login passwords. Deduction was not really her forte. At least, personal deduction wasn't her forte. Instead, the Turk cracked out the Piranha Virus, a particularly nasty invention which was said to have been invented by Uncle Iri himself. It short-circuited all sorts of security systems, making them open completely to the owner of the key only. Guess who had the key?

            Watching with a grin as a thumb-sized fish with huge spiky jaws floated around on the laptop screen, Diera hummed softly to herself under her breath, breaking into the intranet, combing the file paths for Hojo's logs. It wasn't _that_ hard to find them; Shinra's naming system was nicely tidy, and quite logical. Hojo's stuff- as well as other scientific reports- were under the 'BIOTECH' branch, so she just downloaded the lot into her laptop, with an ear out to note the clamor generated as computer systems abruptly froze or shut down on their own, courtesy of the Piranha. 

            With all the ruckus going, it was a safe bet that she would be able to look around a bit more. Now, to create more diversions… A truly evil grin asserted itself. The sound of a frantic howl was music to her ears as the flick of an enter button activated the lab sprinkler system and destroyed any exposed samples Hojo and his cronies might have been working on at the time. Ah, how she loved that sound. There never was enough occasion to hear it. 

            Shutting off her laptop, the 'cleaner' wrapped it in a nondescript gray cloth and stowed it in the rubbish bag again, then unlocked the door and hurried down to the basement. With all that water, _someone_ would be needed to clean it up. And so she was allowed free rein as long as she kept her head down (couldn't chance anyone recognizing those eyes) and mopped assiduously. It wasn't a handicap, though. Turks had long ago mastered the art of looking around without looking up. And boy, did she have stuff to look at.

            Here was evidence of human experimentation. Suspended in huge tubes of glowing green Mako were naked men and women, all ranging from ten to fifty-odd years of physical age, in varying states of health and awareness. Some had their eyes closed, hair drifting slowly around their head and shoulders. Others were half-awake, swimming in the suspension like sleepwalkers, and still others stared blindly ahead with eyes wide open at some invisible horror, nearly bulging out of their sockets, whites tainted silvery green through the haze of mako. A mass of tubes and whirring machinery ran the whole thing, apparently isolated from the computer system. Diera studied the web under lowered eyelashes, scrubbing away, tracing them to a large lever-operated brass monstrosity behind the whole lot. So they used simple machines, not computers, to control these sets of equipment. Hmm. Better not sabotage this. What if the whole lot of them died? She wasn't that eager to kill them, not after La Contresiera, not with full awareness of it. If it had been an accident…

            One tube caught her attention. Set apart from the others, it held a fairly young ash-blond man, naked like all the others, floating in a cloud of long silver hair that gleamed pale green in the thick Mako. He seemed to be frowning in his sleep, pale forehead creased into a mask of concentration. Or at least that was what it looked like, anyway. She worked her way over to him, carefully not turning her head up, but committing his face and form to memory. He looked like Ragnarok's white mirror image. This was, pardon the Junon term, getting fishy. Very fishy. Time to split and run.

            Mopping her way back to the cleaning cart beside the door and grinning mentally as the sprinklers obliterated all traces of her labor, Diera shoved her dripping mop into the squeeze pail, mumbled to herself about getting a fresh pail, and escaped the creepy dark _wet_ basement.

            Things hadn't fallen into place at all. She'd just found more pieces to her puzzle.

            And Ragnarok had a lot to answer for.

--

A/N: So here's Seph! And Ragnarok. Don't worry too much about Ragna. He's mainly there to flesh out what will happen later. And yes, he is a bastard. Like Silk, he likes showing it. That means that I like him a lot. Mwahaha. I want reviews! (rampages) I can't write without reviews!


	15. Easy Come, Easy Go

Colors of War, Chapter 12: A Bitter Rain

            "Who are you?" was the first thing she almost snarled as she strode into the interrogation- oh, sorry, _interview-_ room, pulling her collar straight. She'd barely paused to swing back to her cache of casual clothes in Corel before thundering off to Kalm to have it out with Ragnarok. _Blasted man just sits there in his cadet uniform, the utter bastard._

            He stiffened ever so slightly. She would have liked to have taken it as affirmation of her suspicions, but the muscle tension could have been due in part to the gun she had in her hand, not aimed but clasped firmly in her free hand. Her right hand. Her firing hand. He knew all about her aim firsthand. Mediocre marksman she might be, but _no way_ she was going to miss anything in the closet-like space of the room that Kingston had allowed her. As it was, he hadn't been too happy to back down when Iridalan told him to let her dig at his newest genius recruit. Pushing for a more comfortable space would have been a dangerous move. Not that Diera was complaining. Cramping Ragna was just fine with her. "What exactly do you want with me?" he retorted at length, not crossing his arms. It was an admirable display of restraint.

            It also pointed out that he was avoiding her question. _Something to hide, kitty?_ "Your name is Ragnarok. What's your last name?"

            His brow creased sharply. "I don't have one. I was an orphan."

            "And where did you grow up?" she fired back, warming to her subject.

            "Gongaga."

            "Peachy. Do you have any siblings?"

            "No. What is your purpose in asking these rudimentary questions?"

            He was getting angry. Fine, she was furious anyway. "I'm telling you that Gongaga doesn't have an orphanage! No child has been orphaned in Gongaga as long as I've been alive, and I've seen someone who looks _exactly_ like you. Ring any bells yet?" His jaw dropped open, and he stared at the ground as she began to pace, waving her gun agitatedly. "I don't know what Shinra is playing at, but-" trailing off, she spun to a halt and swung her gun arm up, aiming unerringly for his head. "If I ever find that you're playing hooky for Hojo, I'll blast your brains away."

            It was difficult not to see the sneer that curled his upper lip ever so disdainfully. "You mean, you'll _try_ to blast me."

            She stared at him for some time, unblinking. Then her head moved, eyes still glued to him. Left, right, a small, precise movement. "No. I will hunt you down, Ragnarok, place my gun against your temple and blow your freaking brains all over the floor. I don't care if I have to do it in your sleep, or when you're in the bath, or anywhere. I would see you dead if you leaked anything to that bastard." She had gone past rage and into some cold, clinical dementia, glittering eyes steady and focused. "Do you understand me, Cadet?"

            The sneer had faded visibly, leaving a blank visage behind. Was he afraid? Horrified? Bemused? She didn't know, and didn't give a damn. All that mattered was that he said, short and clipped as if she had been a field sergeant, "Yes sir." His dark bronze eyes, clearly glowing with deep amber from the distance she was viewing them at, tracked her movements with short jerky movements. "Permission to cross-examine the prosecutor?"

            Diera blinked, her anger fading. "What? Oh- suit yourself. Only-" she looked around at the closet-sized interrogation chamber, starting to find it faintly claustrophobic now that she had nothing to argue about. Much. "Let's get outta here. It's no place to talk."

            Dark eyebrows arched. She wondered grimly if Hojo had taught him that. Looked almost exactly like what the git could have pulled off. "May I assume that what we were doing just now was not talk?"

            She smirked. "No. That was _informative_." He smirked back at her, and they both shared a moment of brief chuckles. "Look, since I'm gonna be hanging on your tail anyway… friends?" She held out her hand. Might as well be chums. Save on the masked charade later.

            Ragnarok cracked an evil grin. "Friends. And for the record- I don't like Hojo."

            "What a coincidence. Neither do I. Now let's get out there and cross-examine."

--

            They went to the Garden, that carefully-kept place of lushness in the heart of the SOLDIER compound which was specially set aside for returning officers to unwind. Diera liked it. It made the stark grey-white of the compound more interesting. Ragnarok seemed to enjoy it, too. He didn't seem to have seen much of this kind of sculpted wilderness before. Interesting, as she had surmised.

            A minute turned into an hour, and an hour into an indefinite length of time. She picked his brains and tried to keep him from learning _too_ much from her, though she had the sneaking feeling that Ragnarok was very good at deduction. It immediately made him a fun person to be around, in her opinion. His only problem was that he didn't act like a guy… well, not like any of the guys she was used to being around. He walked, talked and acted like he had a stick jammed up his ass. (And a nice ass it was too, she decided sometime after night fell and they were up one of the trees.) Guys, in her experience, especially orphaned ones, didn't act so uptight _all_ the time. And that sneer! It looked like something that wouldn't seem out of place on a snooty Contresieran noble. It didn't look too bad on Ragna, who carried himself like the world should be following at his heels like a puppy, but it didn't fit with his orphanage story. Curiouser and curiouser. 

            "So," she said finally, brushing some leaves away in an attempt to see the glittering starscape better, "You remember growing up as an orphan in Gongaga. At twenty years and fifty-six days of age, you were scouted by Shinra to participate in their prototype enhancement program, which took half a year to bring you to where you are today." Giving up on trying to see the stars through the luxuriant foliage overhead, she leant back against the sturdy bole of the tree they were both perched on.

            His smirk was felt rather than seen. "No, actually I think you dragged me here."

            "Shut up. Contact with Hojo was limited to physical examinations once a week, according to the defendant?" 

            "Affirmative."

            "You do realize that as a prototype, that kind of behavior is unusual for Hojo. He usually can't keep his hands off his specimens." She grimaced at the reminder of his insistent demands for her to return to the testing. "That's a thought I'd rather not have. Ewwww."

            "I don't enjoy it either. How come you know all about his habits anyway?"

            Her flinch was, thankfully, hidden by the darkness and the angle he was sitting at. "I'm a Turk," she said, grateful that years of cold war with Vincent had taught her how to sound casual as a cat, even under stress. "It's our business to know things, you know. All the world knows that."

            A rustle of branches, and the branch she was sitting on swayed alarmingly as Ragna pulled himself firmly onto it. She fought the urge to kick him off as he carefully inched over to her, amber eyes glowing steadily in the breeze-swept dark. "How much do you know?" he said almost off-handedly, but she could hear the glimmer of interest in his baritone voice. 

            _Danger signs here. _"I thought you said you weren't reporting back to Shinra?" she replied, casually clasping her hands at her stomach, touching the hilt of the knife strapped to her forearm. "Usually only Shinra wants to know stuff like that."

            "Oh, I'm on the Shinra payroll," he admitted blandly. "I just don't report to Hojo."

            "Touché. Ask your supervisor about the Turks. I'm sure he'll tell you all about how we monitor other people's dirty secrets." Her tone was equally bland, but she was already wondering how fast she was going to be able to draw her gun or jump off the tree before he realized that some things she was just not willing to reveal. "Besides, what kind of Turk would I be if I started telling you our secrets? Naughty boy." Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, she swung her legs to one side of the branch and launched herself to the ground, landing in a tuck-and-roll from a five-meter height. A _pansy_ height, Vincent would have called it in disdain. She had other words for it, having a healthy respect for heights. _Intimidating_ would have been one of them. No way was she going to try and look cool when she knew very well what kind of impact it would have on her feet. "See you around, Shinra boy!" she called mockingly over her shoulder, making haste to escape and disappear before he came after her.

            Thankfully, he never did. 

--

            About two days after she returned to Corel with expectations of resuming her dreary work-bound existence, a letter arrived from Zack, whom she had nearly forgotten. Feeling a little guilty, she accepted the envelope from the middle-aged man and stared at it for a moment before tearing it open with one of her knives. What _was_ involved in this pen-pal thing? 

_Dear Dia,_ (it read,)

_Sorry I didn't get to write to you earlier. Lots of things happened after you went off, you know? So maybe you'll want to read about this stuff from an insider. We had reporters crawling all over Gongaga, writing absolute crap. Makes you wonder exactly what they were doing down here anyway, if they weren't interested in writing the facts. _

_Before you ask, did they publish an article on the Weaponsmaster in your local newspapers? _

(Diera frowned. She _had_ come across something like that. Something about the Contresiera-born weaponsmith moving to a house some distance from Gongaga in an effort to escape Shinra's grasp, and ending up having to hold off all of Shinra's mechanical might. She, like any other Turk, had known that the story was complete bullshit. But what was Zack's version of it all…?) 

_I begged a newspaper from a Chocobo courier who was passing through, and boy, did they give shit! I had to read it ten times, I thought they were talking about something else. They asked so many questions while they were here- must have had amnesia after they left or something. _

(Of course Shinra had exerted some of its considerable influence, as well as its considerable fortune. Its money was respectable even if nothing else about it was. Diera sighed in slight envy, eyes still on the letter as she pushed away from the desk and began to spin her seat, meditatively.)

_            It was like this. Old __Pierre__, they got the Contresiera part right, he came down here because we found mithril deposits near where his house is now, like, right after you left. Mayor Hendrik owns that land, so they got an agreement of some sort that allows Pierre to use all the mithril he wants, so long's he gives some of the profits back to the town. Then Shinra comes one step late- we pulled the wool over their eyes for a respectable time- and starts making money noises. Hendrik's a good man. He said no. They tried to bring in hired muscle, then __Pierre__ showed up with a sword and this red materia in it. You should have seen it, he managed to call this really cool ice lady out, and she flattened their bullyboys! He named her Shiva, after the Cosmo god, because her skin looks blue. _

(Red materia, summoning materia, she nodded sagely to herself, tugging the creases straight. Wutai had one. It was their national treasure, their guardian spirit. Leviathan. Nobody knew how many red materia were in existence- they were exceedingly rare, and unique- they summoned a different creature each. The Turks, for all their powers, had never been able to cajole one from any of the known owners. A crying shame, really.)

_            We were picking up scrap metal for _days_. Shinra ran off so fast, they left all their broken machines lying around. Sure, they've got people at the reactors, but they all don't come to the town now, which is just fine with us. We had a big victory celebration with __Pierre__,__ he's a really great guy. I said I wanted to go learn smithing under him, but he just clapped me on the shoulder and said I had another path to take. I wonder what he meant._

_            About a month after Shinra cleared off, I got this call from the Turks. They said they were scouting me for SOLDIER. I mean, me! Imagine that! I didn't think anyone outside Gongaga knew my name. You didn't have anything to do with it, did you?_

(Yech. She winced. Zack was entirely too clear-sighted for her comfort.)

_In any case, they promised that I'd be able to see as much of the world as I wanted, because SOLDIER takes missions all over the world; I hoped I could go and visit you sometime if my missions take me anywhere near there._

(She groaned, attracting curious looks from various cubicle neighbors. The last thing she needed was for the twit to visit her redirection address! Uncle Iri would _kill_ her.)

_I'm writing from SOLDIER barracks, by the way. Commander Kingston was kind enough to advance me my month's stipend so I could pay for a courier's services. Hope you'll be able to write back soon. _

_Sincerely,_

_Zackary Horizon_

_PS: I'm sorry I called you flat. One of my roommates gave me a telling-off when I mentioned it to him. Is it really that much of an insult?_

            She grinned briefly at his plaintive postscript as she raised her eyes from the letter. Trust Zack to bumble serendipitously through life like that! Of course she hadn't minded. Well, she'd minded just a little. Some female part of her envied Aunt Julienna's heartbreaking figure. It hadn't exactly been pleasant to be reminded of that. But she had had more pressing things to worry about immediately after, like the slaughtering of La Contresiera…

            There, she'd thought it to herself. No twinge of inconvenient conscience. Good. Maybe all that unpleasantness about killing had just been PMS, after all. But somehow she just didn't feel entirely energetic about the prospect of killing people, anymore. Not a bad feeling, but she wasn't raring to be on the hunt, either. Strange, that. Really strange. 

            Putting the letter down on her mousepad, the Turk continued to spin circles, watching her fingers curl and twitch in her lap as she thought out her reply. Perhaps telling him her profession outright would be a bad idea, but it would be even worse to have him visit the forwarding address and find that it was a dud apartment. Of course, Iridalan would probably tell her to send a reply to him along the lines of 'no, you may not, I have fanatical chaperones living with me', but judging from his powers of reasoning, Zack wouldn't buy that. She sighed. So much for an independent lifestyle.

            "Oi, Princess." For once, instead of ruffling her now-sleek curls, Silk rapped her lightly on the head with his fist. She looked up at him, deciding that it was a definite improvement. "Iridalan wants you. Now. In his office, the one with the windows."

            "I know where he spends his time these days," she replied irritably, stopping her spin with a foot on the side of her cubicle. "Is he in a good mood or a bad one? I'm not going out there just to get mauled for my shoddy work."

            Pale blue eyes crinkled faintly. "He's in a so-so mood. You know. Not good or bad. He's smoking, though. I guess that would make him in a bad mood. A mild one, mind." Leaning on the back of her chair as she considered her next course of action (whether to walk in with eyes open or pretend not to be in the office at the moment), the ex-whore idly hummed, earning himself an annoyed look. "Why don't you just go and see? I know for a fact he's been having a headache all day. So he can't be in that bad a mood."

            "Since when does a headache indicate _that_?" she asked incredulously.

            "Think about it, if he's got a headache and he wants to see you, probably it's important business and he wants it over with soon so he can take the rest of the day off or pop some aspirin. I'm fairly sure he won't kill you."

            "That's reassuring." Getting out of her chair, she patted his face gently. "If I die? Find yourself a good partner." Both of them grinned, and Silk pointed out that he had no intention of letting her die, they had some physical things to explore first, and who was he going to teach if she croaked on him? Laughing, they walked together to the Administation level and parted ways outside Iridalan's office door.

            Entering the Boss' office followed a certain set of rituals, depending on whether or not you were in good graces with him. If you were certain of his welcome, you just walked straight in the automatic metal doors. If you weren't sure he was expecting you for good things, you used the intercom beside the access pad. It cut down on the body count.

            Diera used the intercom. 

            _"Come in."_ was the curt response to her tentative inquiry. Things were not looking up.

            But she entered anyway, because he was her Leader.

            As she entered the doors whooshed shut behind her, and there was the unmistakable sound of a locking system being activated. Diera's sharp glance at the now-closed door went largely ignored. Iridalan was standing by the large one-way mirror window, hands clenched behind his back in the classic bodyguard's posture. Rumor did have it that Uncle Iri had been a bodyguard before Jessaryk Daniels recruited him for the Turks. Admittedly, Uncle Iri _did_ have a lot of bodyguarding habits. But what bone did he have to pick _now_… "I want to make you the next Recruiter," he said after a long pause and several hard drags at his cigarette. White smoke streamed into the air, acrid and somehow distasteful. But that wasn't the point.

            Diera blinked. 

            Silence marched through the smoky office, waltzed a minute or so, and left like a frightened chicken at her incredulous squawk. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear that, can you repeat it again?" He glared at her from dark-ringed eyes and obliged. "I must have heard wrong," she said vaguely to thin air, turning on her heel to walk slow loops around the office. "I could have sworn that you said you wanted me to be the Recruiter."

            The sound of grinding teeth was audible. Faint, but audible. "I _did_ say that," he gritted tightly, stubbing his fag forcefully into the overflowing ashtray as if that would somehow relieve his frustration. "It's not like you to be so obtuse. In which case, all this is an act. We'll cut the crap and get to the point. Here's your briefing." Picking up a slim folder, he tossed it to her without looking, and began lighting up a fresh cig. She barely managed to catch the file before it hit the floor, but at the expense of her back. He really was feeling nasty today.

            Several minutes of perusal and a backache later, her heart was somewhere in the vicinity of her gut and rapidly sinking.

--

            The Recruiter for the Turks had, at best, a fairly harrowing job. And, Diera reflected glumly, it was about to get worse. Standing in Iridalan's neat, impersonal room in her navy undersized suit, fingers itching to get on a gun, she wondered why in hell Iridalan was giving her the Recruiter's job.

            Intellectually she understood the... rationale... behind the delegation of a Recruiter. She just didn't understand why Iridalan wasn't going to continue doing it himself. All Turks swore loyalty to the Leader. Since all further allegiances would be sworn to the Recruiter, Iridalan was effectively stabbing himself in the back. Nobody, barring the older generation, would have any loyalty to him. Recently she had discovered the existence of the Recruiter, which Iridalan was doing in tandem with the Leader's job, but wouldn't that follow that Iridalan should pass this particular burden to a person like _him_? 

            Heavens forbid that _she_ was like _him_...

            Add on the fact that Diera did not feel quite up to a major job like this, and things were looking distinctly crummy. She had been looking forward, after the La Contresiera massacre, to a short happy latency period of espionage. Nice stuff, espionage. The expressions especially were entertaining to watch. What fun was there in asking people to follow you? Her general conclusion was that Uncle Iri knew just what spanner to throw into her idyllic plans for the future. Entirely typical of him...

            "You probably know why you're here," the Leader said at length, tapping the ash off his cigarette. Diera held her breath and hoped he got over this nervous phase soon. This was doing bad mojo to her lungs. "So I won't waste your time. In a nutshell, the Recruiter has exactly one special job; to take over the Leader when the Leader croaks. All your additional duties pave the way for you to step in when your time comes."

            Aaaaah. So... Hey... wait... 

            Her jaw dropped and she accidentally inhaled some of the acrid smoke, falling into a fit of coughing. Keeping both hands over her mouth, she spat discreetly into her palm and tried again. "You want me to be Leader? After you? Did I hear right?"

            Iridalan spun his chair to gaze pensively out of the window at the bustling city, easy to do since this office was on the second floor. No floor higher than this. Corel was a pretty small town, heightwise. "Things have changed since the Turks were created," he said quietly, after a drag at his cig. "A lot of things. I dare to say that none of the Turks before our generation incurred as much damage, loss and gain among us. And I can't handle it much longer. You understand that no other Leader has lasted as long as I have."

            She nodded once, precisely, still hazy as to where he was going with this. Why choose her?

            "I'm getting old, Diera, look at me. My hair's getting grey in it. My reflexes are slowing down. I don't think as fast as I used to, I think more than I used to, and my heart is giving out on me." Privately she looked, really looked, and was astonished. All along everyone had been 'old' to her. It had never occurred that they were getting 'older'. And indeed Iridalan looked... wasted, as if he was a pair of jeans that had been scrubbed too hard, too many times. 

            Some small part of her, that part that still remembered when she was very small and toddled everywhere when Vincent was occupied, remembered those callused hands lifting her with a rumble of sly laughter, hands attached to a strong, well-fleshed frame, and breath tainted only by alcohol. He hadn't started smoking until... when? She had been away too often, trying to escape her own fears, totally missing all these details. 

            She was too worldly to feel guilty, but she did manage some feeling of regret. This was no way for a Turk to act. Their survival depended on the decisions of the Leader; one bad one was no reason for her to abandon him like she had. "I still think you're a good Leader," she said finally, hands still covering her nose and mouth. "Old or not. I'm too young to take Recruiter duties, Uncle Iri. Hurst, or even Silk-"

            "I've made my choice," he cut in with a note of dreadful finality. "I don't know how much longer I can last in this position. Frankly, once I go you'll be stuck with the crisis of all time, and you're used to emergencies, aren't you?"

            Diera winced. "Yes, sir." 

            Stubbing his cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray, Iridalan got to his feet, brushing invisible dirt from the front of his suit. "You're turning fourteen next year, no?"

            She looked down at herself, then up at him, vaguely surprised. "I think so."

            "Along with the duties of a Recruiter come some conditions and some privileges. Your main duty will be to scout out new Turk candidates, provided that they are of a legal age and have no other support in the world. Because of the need for credibility, you will be issued all the effects of a legal teenager, as well as your choice of a single apartment to live in if you wish. Driving training will be undertaken, as well as instruction on how to act like a normal girl of sixteen." He smiled, a thin, cynical smile. "As far as adolescence goes."

            "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" she returned blandly, waving the last traces of smoke away. "Of course you can't. Rule number fifty-one, remember? Very traditional rule. And I'm not on birth control yet."

            He snorted. "You're too clever for your own good. Shoo now, leave an old man to his dreams." And he turned back to the window, back to the bustling people, back to the world he remembered. Diera saluted him with two fingers, bowed, and left his close, stifling office. Maybe he didn't notice the way it choked, but it was choking him... like a collar. Yeah, like a choke chain on a dog. Once upon a time, he'd had teeth... well, TEETH. Fangs. Canines. Now it was all blunted. 

            La Contresiera had taken her steel. It had also taken Uncle Iri's heart, as things seemed. 

            Folding her hands together behind her back, she walked back to the offices, troubled. 

--

            Silk was there when she went in, supervising the reluctant bucket line of trainees passing stacks of files from her own cubby to a large, hastily emptied room opposite Uncle Iri's. "What's this all about?" she demanded suspiciously, grabbing an armful of boxes from one  sour-faced young woman. "Put those back! Silk, what's all this fuss for?"

            "Keep going, people!" he shouted, snagging the files back from her and shoving it at the glowering trainee. "News is all over the office, princess, my darling." He waggled a finger in her face. "You've been put up real high, haven't you?"

            "I haven't even accepted- PUT THOSE DOWN RIGHT NOW!" Diera hollered indignantly, shaking a fist at the 'bucket line'. "Silk, explain yourself immediately! And the rest of you, _STOP MOVING THINGS_." Her voice dropped and vibrated without losing any of its volume, earning instant petrification from the rookies, and a few of the other Turks in nearby cubicles besides. Silk gave her a sardonic look and some quiet applause which only served to annoy her further. 

            Leaning in close, the Contresieran said, softly and quite seriously, "You're going to be the Recruiter. You just did The Voice so well that everyone stopped to look, or listen. Now let the nice kids move your stuff so that you can turn into a bigger monster than you already are. That's the game, isn't it? Bigger, badder, better. Climb the rank ladder. How far up can you climb?"

            "I don't want to climb, Silk, I just want to spy. Is that too much?"

            "Under the circumstances, yeah, it is. Now take these," he dumped a pile of rolled-up maps and records into her arms, "and go to the nice empty office. You need to know where all the stuff is, don't you?"

            She made an extremely uncomplimentary remark and stalked off, managing to do it quite well in flats. Silk grinned at his own coolness. _Score one for the power behind the throne. Yes!_ He hadn't entirely been joking about The Voice, but it would be even more fun to bug the hell out of her, especially with her promotion, because she'd never be rid of him. Sparing the cliché, she _needed_ him around. 

            His evil snicker went unnoticed. Diera had already stormed out of earshot. 

            Like Iridalan at Contresiera, if she had heard, he would definitely have been treated to an ear-ringing slap. Maybe multiple ones.

--

A/N: (insert evil laughter) I love Ragna! He's the epitome of a lousy spy. And, as usual, people are messing around in Dia's life without her permission. So much for the badass reputation… (more evil laughter) I love doing that to her, too. Things should be moving on now. 

Things to do in the next chapter:

-Get Ragna to disappear

-Get Seph out of his tube

-Start the Wutai War. 

…oops…

I wonder if Yuffie will ever forgive me. Oh, well.

Love you all who reviewed (Seppy! Yay!)

Akishira


	16. Nemesis

  Colors of War, Chapter 13: Taking Sides

            Intensive training started barely an hour after Iridalan's announcement. No doubt his knowledge of her nature had pressed him to ignore her opinion and go ahead with the promotion- if one could call it that- without waiting for her to accept it, formally. 

            Now, dangling by one hand from a sheer rock face, she cursed every star in the Cosmo pantheon which had brought her life to this close. _'Get up there', indeed!_ She flinched away from an inquisitive bird, scrabbling with hopelessly broken nails for another handhold while trying very hard not to think about how far down everything else was. Or how far up she was. The top seemed awfully far away, but she resolutely kept her eyes on it- no need to tempt fate. Uncle- no, _Hurst_- had refused her the use of a safety harness. He, like many of the older Turks, was of the opinion that if you didn't survive it, you probably didn't deserve to survive anyway. _Damn the lot of them._

            Mako _could_ ensure her survival. But falling several hundred meters down a cliff riddled with sharp outcroppings (which she had discovered in the worst possible way after several such falls from lesser heights) was not her idea of a successful training exercise. Besides, who knew if Hojo would manage to weasel his way back to try out weird things on her under the pretence of "medical advice"? _No go, girl. Mind on the task here. Surely you don't want to fall down _again. _Hurst will NEVER let you live that down, even if you do survive._ A grunt of laughter oozed out of her strained throat. _Note to self: make their lives a living hell when Iridalan retires. Oh, it's going to be a fun lifetime._ Finding a hairline crack and digging painful fingers into it, she laboriously crawled an infinitesimal inch upwards, finding with some relief that the cliff had a downward slope around this area. Thank the Planet for rest stops.

            In the interests of getting on with life, suffice to say that she spent several more hours hauling herself to the top of the cliff, where a stony-faced Hurst waited. She wondered how long he had been up there- in the agonizing first dozen or so tries it took her to climb more than a two-storey height, he had been there, watching her push her battered body out of the dirt again and again. The coldly clinical set of his face suggested that he was testing the limits of the Mako. If two stories' worth didn't kill her, what would? Somehow there was something unnerving about being watched like a bug. _I will never laugh at guinea pigs ever again,_ she swore to herself, listening with only half an ear to what Hurst was saying. Something about determination and the capacity of the human body to extend itself under duress. Only about a quarter of it made sense to her tired brain, but the words sank into her memory like pebbles falling into a tepid pool. She'd be able to remember everything later- she just wasn't processing _now_.

            She managed to get her feet under her with the help of a none-too-gentle haul on her collar from her soon-to-be peer. Why in the name of the Planet had she ever agreed to this? No, wait, she hadn't agreed to this. For about the four hundredth time in the past day, she cursed Iridalan all the way into the fifth generation. Hurst's hand on her dress shirt collar as she stumbled back towards the elevator which would take them back into the offices proper was solid, a cold sort of comfort. He would catch her. He wouldn't spare her any of the pain, but he would catch her.

            And it was almost enough for her to forgive him for the agony of the day.

--

            _ "I never meant for you to dream of all this, you know."_

_            Light…light and sun-shadow. Grass flowing in waves down an endless, rolling meadow freckled with trees, here and there. She stands beside him, dressed in a simple green dress, her curly violet-black hair rippling in the determined wind. His lean, long frame is garbed in a simple brown Wutaian wrap, belted twice across the waist. He stares out at the endless expanse of green, seemingly one with the earth, the wind, nature itself. She avoids looking at him too closely. Something in her rejects the thought of taking a dream for real. "Well," she replies caustically, "maybe you can do something about it?"_

_            "Sorry." He doesn't sound apologetic at all. She resists the urge to kick him. "It seems to be part of what we passed on to you, plus what _She_ passed on to you. Unavoidable, really. Again, sorry. But life seems to be treating you fairly well." At her loud snort, he shrugs. "Insofar as you enjoy life. I must say, you turned out to be more of a problem than we anticipated."_

_            "So happy to know I was part of your snarky little plan."_

_            "Be nice. The Planet depends on this, so pay attention. You probably won't remember much when you wake up, though…"_

_            "Might as well spare me the lecture, then," she mutters sullenly, bending down and wrenching a handful of long grass from the ground at her feet. A hard cuff over the ear lands her sprawling in the warm green arbor. Surprised and angry, she rolls to her feet, swaying slightly in the uncertain footing. She is barefoot, she finds to her chagrin; her feet are slashed and bloody from the sharp grass. He stares down at her, distant, alien, inhuman._

_            "You would never have scaled the heights if not for us," he hisses, long brown hair whipping furiously in the sudden gale. "You were chosen, out of the puling, pathetic lot of them, chosen to fight for us. Never forget that, Nameless. As long as you live, you will fight our battle. Fight well, Nameless. The Planet will not accept you until we deem you worthy of death. Now go!"_

_            The grasslands spring into abrupt green flame, dissolving in a whirl of green sparks. She falls into darkness, knowing that it is where she belongs…_

_--_

            "…SHIT!" she swore, bolting awake, pushing aside sweat-soaked sheets. The medical wing was deserted, and sun streamed in through the narrow slats of windows. High afternoon at least. What was she doing here? A quick glance at the light bandages on the end of each limb told her- treatment for her abused feet and hands. They throbbed with a dull ache, spreading throughout her bruised body. Her arms were mottled with healing bruises which looked at least a week old. How long had she been asleep?

            Silk lifted a sardonic eyebrow from the next bed, where he reclined amid a traction device and copious amounts of paperwork. "So you're awake, sleeping beauty." He flushed faintly at her wide-eyed look. "It wasn't my fault. Blackthorne decided that since I was going to be your partner, I needed some shaping up. I'll be in traction for the next two weeks at least, I tell you. Bloody superiors and their damn ideas of progress. How's life treating you?"

            Diera gave him a narrow glare. "What does it look like?" She held up her mottled forearms, wincing as her grimace pulled muscles in her battered face. She hadn't been entirely successful in the tuck and roll. Hard to bunch up when you're bouncing off a variety of interesting rocks. "Does my face look as bad as my arms do?"

            "Sure it does. You didn't break anything, though, so count yourself lucky," he added helpfully, waving one hand for emphasis. "D'you want a bite? You've been out of it for nearly two days."

            "Two _days_? No wonder I'm on a drip," she noted sourly, hiding her surprise. "I'm surprised my covers aren't wet." Determinedly, she began to pick at the tape holding the drip in. The skin itched and burned as she rubbed the end of the tape, unable to use her nails to pick it off. Eventually the tape lost adhesiveness and sloughed, allowing her to peel the pieces off neatly, but the needle had been jostled so much that the skin around the entry site was torn. She swore again, carefully pulling the metal implement out and letting it dangle free. Diera disliked being on the receiving end of pointy metal things, even if they _were_ beneficial. Hojo and his Nibelheim gig had made sure of that. Brrr. "Is all that paperwork yours?"

            He grinned. "No. Most of it is yours, actually. I've been fielding it for you. Nothing much better to do. Come here and give me a hello kiss, _cherie_…" His smile grew wider as she gave an annoyed sniff and limped stiffly over to peck his lips briefly. Silk Ashner never lacked for partners among his colleagues, even under the worst of situations, so he could afford to snicker at his partner's inexperience in dealing with intimate situations. "Loosen up a bit more," he said anyway, deciding that he might as well be as snarky as he could. "Not every kiss is personal, you know… and you can use it for intimidating people."

            Her affronted hiss and the ensuing smooch was enough to help his grin rival a Yin-Yang's in wideness. "Better now?" she huffed, and stormed out of the medical wing, presumably in search of something other than a hospital wrap to wear.

--

            Diera was in a foul temper. Having people snicker at her state of dress- or lack thereof- was one thing. Realizing that her feminine attributes had taken a leap without her was much, much worse. Her period had come in full force, and every muscle ached with the added strain of hormonal imbalances. At least the medics had had the presence of mind to equip her with a pad and tampon while she clawed her way back into consciousness. Bless them. They had brains, even if the rest of them seemed to use theirs solely for the purpose of aggravating her. Not for the first time, she cursed her Mako enhancements; her system metabolized pure drugs too quickly for her to enjoy the benefits of painkillers. It would be so much trouble to hunt down one of the poison specialists and get a herbal brew going. _Shit, shit, shit. I hate being female._

            _Yeah, get in touch with my inner bitch. I rank you, take that! _Straightening her back, pushing aside the twisting ache that reached up from behind her navel, she imitated Iridalan at his best, projecting her anger at the world in general without much difficulty. The teasing faded in her ears as she stalked (or limped) barefoot (and painfully, she might add) down the immaculate, newly carpeted corridors. _Hmm. Like the carpeting. But no dramatic effect now… hard to have clicking boots on carpet… _Her knees wavered alarmingly, and she clutched the wall, furious at herself for her weakness. _Gods, one climbing lesson and you faint like a bloody virgin on wedding night. Left foot first, right foot next, shuffle your hands along the wall, that's good, remember to cuss out the next person who gives me the hairy eyeball when I meet them, that's the way, have a rest break. Oh, gods. _"What the hell are you looking at?!" she snapped acidly, scaring off one of the greenies (freshly initiated by the look of the woman) who had sidled up with the apparent intention of 'helping her out'. "Don't you have a class somewhere?" The woman beat a hasty retreat, red to the ears. _Gods, how far can it be to my own room? Wait, don't answer that._

Every slow step seemed like an eternity, and she glared off the concerned advances of her fellows, slowly finding her world narrowed down to a hazy tunnel of red, black and white. _Right foot. Left foot. Stop. Breathe. Raise foot, put it down, breathe. Concentrate. Repeat steps one through to five- or is that three, or six? Who cares? Just move those blasted feet and keep going, gods, this hurts. I will kill Iridalan when I feel better. What if I never feel better again? I hope all this is just the monthlies. Damned Mako doesn't help with the period, doesn't seem made for women at all, just look at all those poor sods that Hojo experimented on, every side effect from mutation to permanent mental dysfunction. Maybe I could ruin his research for him, no, wait, didn't I already do that, like, half a week ago?_ Her hand felt toward the blessed access pad for her room, and she pressed her sweaty left hand down on the print pad, waiting for the door to slide open before she limped inside.

            It was quite some time before she registered the steaming mug on her desk, and the note beside it. Mostly it was the smell that alerted her- her vision had already gone to pieces, and it was an effort not to gag at the strongly aromatic brew. Not that it smelled vile or anything- under normal circumstances it would probably have tasted quite pleasant- but her gut twisted at the smell of oranges, peppermint and, strangely, coffee. It made her clap both hands over her face and breathe through her mouth for some time. When she was sure that she could approach it without retching onto her nicely carpeted floor, dull though the color may be, she shuffled cautiously and picked up the paper first. 

_Diera, _(it read)

_I knew you'd be bulling around when I saw your cot empty, so I_

_ left some painkiller potion here. Drink up, then take a bath and _

_a nap. I'll expect you in for a follow-up tomorrow at 10 am. _

_Jennings_

_PS: Extra gauze. You know where to find it._

            Bless the man twice over. Holding her breath to shut out some of the sensory overload, she downed the potion in a series of nervous gulps and sat down on the swivel chair carefully, keeping her posture ramrod-straight in case any of it decided to come back up. The still-warm brew swilled its leisurely way down to her belly, where it sat fermenting for several long minutes before she started feeling more like her old self. 

            Didn't help her mood all that much, but at least she went to sleep with a greatly expanded worldview. 

--

            Paul Jennings, the man most commonly known as The Unflappable. Default counselor of most of the Turk force. A nasty shot with a gun, too. Diera adored him, if only for the fact that Jennings gave the most sensible advice. For example, he had been one of the few who supported her opinion that Vincent should have just hit Lucrecia Kamryn over the head and hauled her somewhere to properly woo her without the unpleasant complication of Kurayama Hojo. Smart man. Perfectly sensible. 

            The Unflappable status was never in doubt as he went over her with a patently professional air, inspecting the fading bruises with a gloved hand and unwrapping her clumsily rewrapped limbs to pronounce the damage mended. The scrapes and lacerations had indeed healed nicely (though grossly ahead of time) and the only bad thing, as he commented to her, was that now she had a pressing need for a good manicurist who could repair the damage, yet keep from making her hands _too_ ladylike. Things like that could be fatal for a Turk, whose primary job was infiltration and espionage. Who knew what sadistic job Iridalan would line up for her next? Jennings agreed, albeit for slightly different reasons, that the Leader was getting seriously out of whack. He never did tell her what his reasons were. Jennings, as a long-time counselor- he had seen the company almost through to its founding- had lots of experience at keeping his own counsel. She knew that nothing she could do would change his ways, so she refrained from prying. Instead, she asked, "Why the cliff?"

            Jennings' mouth twisted into an amused smirk as she rearranged the straps of her singlet-cum-tank-top. "It's an advanced initiation test of the Recruiter. If it's any comfort, you're the third best record in Turk history. There have been records of Recruiter candidates hanging from the cliff face for days. This one probably elevated you from a rank to a class. Expect a meeting with Blackthorne soon."

            "Jennings, there have only been about five other Leaders in our History."

            "Does that make any kind of difference? They are the ones who survived the cliff," he pointed out with impassive logic. "And you are only one girl, barely into puberty. Carry yourself with confidence. He'll probably be getting you to crash course the Cosmo Canyon rig next."

            She nodded glumly. "Thanks, sir," the girl said quietly, standing and smoothing her rumpled cullocks, discreetly checking for wet patches. "Um- do you have any more of that potion mix?" she added, hopefully. Although he had just given her a hot mug, one could never be too well prepared, and the medical wing was quite a walk from her room. Jennings gave her a long, flinty look that had _NO_ all over it. 

            There are two kinds of no. One is the kind that can be worn down to a 'yes'. The other kind is the _NO._

            She winced involuntarily at the look, raising her hands in defeat, and retreated. She _could_ have used The Voice and most probably gotten away with it, but Vincent had, mostly via her frequent trips to the medical department, instilled in her a deep conviction that the medics knew what they were doing. If you got a _NO,_ there was probably a damned good reason for letting you suffer. Probably if you attempted to circumvent them without your _own_ damned good reason, they made sure you suffered more. Never anger the people who put you back together. They know exactly how to take you apart again. It was a rule that every Turk worked out sooner or later, hopefully without the cost of any important limbs. 

            Oh, well. At least she wasn't limping anywhere. It was an improvement. She stopped by Silk for a brief chat and (it was all his fault) kissing lessons. Her uncles and aunts had often given her books, and some of them made kissing into a fantasy experience. Silk somehow managed to make it completely clinical, do this to get this reaction. "Besides," he explained, "if you make people feel good, chances are they'll be willing to tell you more. Your combat skills aren't that fantastic, you know. Iri may have promoted you, but your area of work will most likely be in information retrieval."

            Her shrug acknowledged the truth of that. "At least I can still punch with the best of them," she commented wryly, flexing her newly healed hands. "One thing the Mako _is_ good for. How's the leg, by the way?"

            "You spend fifteen minutes with me before asking that question?" he said, mock-hurt. "Honestly, Jennings used Cure materia to fix most of the damage, but I'll still be under traction for a bit. Speed healing tends to produce weak spots in the join. My guess is that he'll turn me out sometime next week."

            She grinned. "Five gil says he'll do it this week. Ten says it's Uncle Iri who'll make him do it."

            "You're on." He pulled her down for another kiss, and they both laughed at the irate medic who came to chase Diera out.

--

            Within the two and a half days she had been out of action, the paperwork had settled in discouragingly large stacks on and around her table. Silk had apparently gotten someone to move the work which he'd been fielding for her back into her office, the cheap bastard. She allowed herself a minute or so to fume at him before diving grimly into the fray. 

            Saying that papers went flying with the force of her gusto would have been stretching things, but she would have liked to say it. It was certainly true that she could work remarkably fast when she put her mind to it. With no food or drink on hand, her door firmly closed, there was nothing to distract her from working. Besides, she told herself, the sooner she finished all this, the sooner she could see Jennings about another dose of the potion- which had begun to wear off midway through the day- and find some dinner. She ended up skipping lunch by an hour or so, and hurrying down to the medical wing for a quick dose (prepared, as usual, ahead of time by one of the medics who had an odd accuracy of intuition). 

            And then dinner came to her attention, as well as the fact that the offices seemed to be mostly empty. Iridalan had gone off somewhere, and the few people she could find around the office proper told her that he'd been on a reassignment spree ever since she was promoted. People had been dispatched all over the world to the various offices, surprisingly including Wutai, to bolster the failing network and reactivate channels of relationship. He seemed determined to make sure that the Turks survived long enough for Diera to actually _do something_ once she took the reins. 

            A more charitable person might have thanked him for the kind thought. Diera pushed the information to the back of her mind, resolving not to be grateful or annoyed. She hadn't quite forgiven him for putting her through purgatory, but on hindsight he was probably doing what he thought was best, right? Besides, he was old, old and tired. It merited a bit of leeway. So, leave him alone- for now. While it suited her.

            Anyway- dinner. Dinner sounded good. Rather than bung around in the office kitchens (yes, they did exist for the gratification of those in the force who liked cooking, as well as for the training of agents for domestic infiltration roles) trying to put together something which would agree with the state of her quieted menses, she decided to venture out to the village inn and see what they had handy. It would be an opportunity to see if anything had changed since her climb up the local cliff, as well. 

            The times were changing too quickly, Shinra moving too fast, for anything to be quite the same from day to day. Better safe than sorry, as Lancir and Vincent had said to her often enough. It all made horrible sense, she thought disgustedly to herself as she moved out and away of the Turk HQ, eyes on the evidence of Shinra work in the distance. How _had_ they managed to wrest a concession out of Dyne Holland so quietly, so quickly? Had one of Dyne's supporters taken his ear harshly? Questions, questions.

            Stifling the urge to grab the first passerby by the collar and shake an explanation out of him, she forced herself to walk casually to the inn, go to the innkeeper, and, unable to repress her shock, grab _him_ by the collar.

            "What the hell is going on?!"

            "Ah, one of the Turks," the man said rather calmly, for a person who had been half-hauled over his counter. "Haven't seen one of yours around for a bit. No wonder Iridalan was looking haggard when he left."

            "I'll get to that in a bit," she hissed. "Did Dyne fold? How come Shinra's building?"

            "Gave in yesterday," he agreed sagely, nodding- or at least he appeared to nod. With the relocation of his collar a few inches upwards it was a bit hard to tell. "We decided it'd be best. With the Mako, the elders reckoned we could be a better town, maybe even a city. Y'know, like La Contresiera… maybe better! So we let them at it yesterday, and look how fast they're building. What might your name be, by the way?"

            Her chilly glare made his cheer fade considerably. "Don't distract me! What happened with Iridalan? What was he doing before he left? Did he say anything?"

            "I don't know!" the innkeeper yelped, intimidated. "He didn't come by here, I heard it from Winlan down the road, don't hurt me, I don't know anything!" He continued on this vein for some time, while Diera snarled impotently and glared off the well-meaning inn patrons who attempted to talk her out of her aggressive posture. "He told old Fitzger he'd be back before the week was out," he added, eyes very large in his tanned face. They looked on the verge of popping out, actually. 

            She dropped him like last week's news, smoothing her ruffled feathers with a visible effort, and sliding back off the counter. Vaguely she wondered how she'd gotten up there. Oh, well. "I'm… sorry," she said at length, surreptitiously _way_ overtipping him to emphasize her apology, "I've laid up for the past few days… must be the painkillers talking… do you have anything to eat?" Right then they would probably have given anything to have her out of their door, so she tactfully asked for a doggy bag as well, and got remarkably swift service. She left before they could start begging. It was good for her ego, but Uncle Iri was probably going to hear about this when he came back. Argh. Damn the monthlies! Damned mood swings. 

            A letter was waiting on her bedroom desk when she returned there to eat. 

            _My, aren't I popular?_

--

            Rather surprisingly, this one was from Commander Kingston, about his pet project. 

            In other words, Ragnarok. (So she surmised, reading the note on the back.)

            Wondering how in blazes he got the funny idea that _she_ was somehow responsible for any of Ragna's business, she tore open the letter, and unfolded the curt missive with one hand while extracting a cup of soup from her spoils with the other. What was he whining about _now_?

_Ms Diera Raistlorne:_

_Greetings, and congratulations on your recent promotion._

(She scowled, sipping her soup. Was it all over the news now? She certainly hadn't remembered knowing about Winter Doros' being the Recruiter at first snap. Kingston was all buddy-buddy with Iridalan, though, so it was most likely that Uncle Iri had told the Commander about it for the sake of inter-company relations. Still- all this was getting a little annoying.)

_Although I cannot say that he consulted with me before deciding on this development, your abilities and skills seem to be in order with his conclusions. I have also taken into account the surprisingly firm persuasion with which you pressed on me in order to interrogate the Shinra transplant, and my own opinion is that you should be all right on the job. _

_Though your technique could use some refinement. Not everyone responds well to being blackmailed._

_On the topic of one Shinra transplant, I have some rather strange news for you. Ragnarok, as you well know, is one of the prototypes they experimented on for SOLDIER Mako enhancement. They released him to us with full assurance that he was in a stable condition, and had been for a suitable length of controlled time. However, he suffered an odd breakdown almost immediately after you completed your lengthy interrogation. I must request that you return to give a full explanation and tender at least a token assistance concerning his situation. As soon as possible. _

_Regardless of whether or not you had intimate relations with him-_

(She spat soup all over the letter. Where had he _gotten_ those ideas from? Could he be sued for slander? Defamation? Could she possibly have any leeway for crashing the SOLDIER systems as payback? Probably not. On with the letter. It was now wet and half of it was horribly smudged, but Mako eyesight picked out the words easily. Oh, well.)

_Regardless of whether or not you had intimate relations with him, I have decided to be temporarily forgetful concerning your relationship. As far as I am concerned, it does not exist. In any case, it does not seem to bother any of your colleagues, so forgive me for my delicacy. _

_Regards,_

_Mathias E. Kingston_

_SOLDIER Commander_

_Kalm_

_PS: One Zackary Horizon claims to know you by your long-time pseudonym of Dia Valentine, as I found out after he placed a request for a courier's services. I have assigned him to be your guide upon reaching here, as it is unlikely that you know where our confinement cells are. I also recommend that you give some thought to choosing a more misleading alias. It was not difficult to tell _who_ he was referring to, especially with the description he volunteered. I have not yet informed him of your occupation and/or status, so telling him would probably be a good idea. _

            Mopping up the mess with one of the napkins provided with her takeout, she fumed. 'Intimate relations' indeed! What did that buffoon think he was driving at? Hinting that the Turks were immoral? Well, most of them were, but such an assumption… oh, hell. 

            Diera tore into the rest of her dinner like a Nibel Wolf on the attack, completely annoyed. It seemed to be a constant state of mind, these days.

--

            "…and that's all I did," she finished exasperatedly, rolling back on the cot adjacent Silk's. He surveyed her over the Coke she'd gotten as a bribe, silver eyebrows upraised, blue eyes quite serious. "I didn't even _touch_ Ragna in any way that might have been misunderstood. Hell, I didn't touch the queer at all!" 

            "Kingston jumps to a lot of conclusions," Silk pointed out dryly. "It's what got him his rank, the intuitive streak. Luckily he doesn't guess wrong on much other than relationships. Let it slide, princess. It isn't worth getting worked up over." He caught the pillow she threw at him, one-handed. The Coke didn't even slop. She looked at it a little enviously. "But he got one thing right- you've been lazy with your aliases, too lazy."

            "Well, it was a freak storm, how would I know I'd need a false identity to deal with some boy?" She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. Silk's eyes had widened with glee. Diera was notorious for being the youngest, and the most asexual of the lot of them (mostly due to her early height and late feminine growth). Now that he had some male connection to work with… "It's not what it sounds like!" she added hastily, sitting up. "I collapsed on his doorstep…"

            The smirk could have cut something. Silk showed his model-perfect white teeth in a positively evil leer. "Do I need to say something?" he inquired sweetly, lounging. Or lounging as best as one could manage with one leg in a cast and in traction. With his experience, he managed to make his posture comically suggestive. 

            Diera's lip curled. "No."

            "Well, keep your temper in check!" he yelled after her retreating back.

            "Screw you, Ashner, screw you." With that parting comment, she stalked back to the office to clean up and put her things in order for yet another trip to the SOLDIER headquarters. Somewhat unsurprisingly, there was another letter- a memo, really- waiting on her desk, printing itself from the fax machine used to send inter-departmental (not just intra-office) documents. It had stepped up work speeds, but also caused a lot of unhappiness. Nothing like thinking you'd finished your work, then having someone _coincidentally_ send over another wad of work for you to take care of. What was he up to now? 

_Heard about SOLDIER from network. Shinra approached them._

_Take Materia with you. Could mean trouble._

            Materia? Was this situation that dangerous? Interest piqued, she read the lines that scrolled out next, and her blood turned to ice water in her veins.

_Wutai offices closed. Close office and head for Kalm._

_Group by specialty. Medics included. Transport weapons cache._

_Leave when task is complete. Remain at SOLDIER._

            She bolted from the office with the finished fax in hand.

            War with Wutai, like it or not, was beginning.

--

            "Looks like you owe me fifteen gil," she said mockingly, but the laugh didn't reach her eyes. Silk held her arm in a steadying grip- the slight limp he still suffered showing in the listing of his normally erect carriage- dressed in his preferred 'working clothes' of mithril armor over a black dress shirt and heavy grey cotton slacks. A denim duster was draped, cloaklike over his faintly hunched shoulders, slightly broader through the shoulders than the twin of it that Diera herself wore. She'd put down her shorts for this serious situation, dressing instead in the tight leather pants (with a special gusset piece) and cross belt holster favored by most of the fighting female Turks. If she was going to be a leader, might as well make a statement. With a height approaching five foot eight and the beginnings of lush curves, she looked at least five or six years older than her actual thirteen, and reasonably mature. But nervous.

            He bumped heads with her, easy to do at their half-a-head height difference, comfortingly. "Payment aside, will you be all right? You haven't ever stood out in an official capacity before. Except for bashing heads," he added thoughtfully. "You're good at bashing heads. Are you bringing backup? Just in case a stray monster comes your way, remember- you'll get your clock cleaned if you go out there alone."

            "Rudon Skoll and Silence are coming with me," she told him wistfully, touching his hand with hers. "You remember Rudon, right? Uncle Dan's kid. He came in with the last promotions. Hand-to-hand combat. You'd like to square off with him, I think. From what I heard, he's actually quite handy-"

            "You're babbling, princess," he reminded her ironically, arching one aristocratic eyebrow. "Get Skoll to do the wicked dance with you. Have a good shag, and you'll feel better. I speak from experience," he added loftily, catching her quizzical look. "Nothing like sex to make the body shut down properly. Not like it's likely you'll still have a hymen left anyway, not after all those years of training, so you don't even have to worry about keeping pure-"

            "Ashner, don't you _ever_ think about _anything_ but the next lay?" she said half-exasperatedly, pushing him off her. He moved away with good grace, standing mostly on his good foot, but didn't deny anything. "Really, you're going to have to impress me if you want to teach me any of the bed arts!" His eloquent glance and hand movement expressed his willingness to please her any way she needed to be 'impressed'. "Whatever! Just go and join the medics already!" Gathering her saddlebags and the shreds of her dignity, the Recruiter fled into the corridors to the gleeful accompaniment of Silk's baritone laughter.

            Some things never changed.

--

            Travel from Corel to Kalm by black chocobo took something like a day, maybe less; she cut it to three hours by working her mount to near-foundering. All right, so the bird was precious, but she needed to do her job more. As a sort of apology, Diera parked it at SOLDIER barracks and roped one of the trainees into caring for him. Rudon and Silence tipped questioning looks at her as their birds caught up minutes later, a clear inquiry as to her need to be escorted. "I have an escort," she called reassuringly, giving the hand signal to '_stay put_'. Silence signaled back affirmatively, moving swiftly to head off Rudon's faintly puzzled questions. Being mute had its uses, sometimes. 

            Zack was fidgeting at the SOLDIER barracks foyer, waiting for her. Apparently, Uncle Iri had put a certain call through to Commander Kingston… she shook her head in bemusement as she trotted briskly up the steps, the train of her duster flaring behind her. His jaw had dropped as he saw her taking the steps two at a time, fairly bounding. She could only guess what she looked like in his eyes- Mako made the rest of the world seem slow by comparison, as if she was moving under a constant low-level Haste. Wait till he got his own enhancements! Then the rest of the world would seem slow, too. She'd adjusted long ago, but he'd probably be banging into things for awhile… if he lived that long, she added darkly to herself. Reaching him at last, she waved a hand in front of his stunned face, resisting the urge to giggle maniacally, feeling strangely kittenish. "It's _me_," she said pointedly, gesturing at her rather unremarkable chest. "The flat one, remember?"

            He choked and spent a few seconds cycling from red to green to red again. "_Dia?_ I thought you were-" his wildly gesticulating hand indicated what his previous impression of her had been, "-I mean, wow! Are you really Dia?"

            She sighed. "Yes. I _am_ Dia. You sent me a letter some time ago, as I recall… does that clear things up?"

            If anything, his eyes got wider. "But Dia was small!"

            It didn't really prick her dignity, but for some reason she found it comical. Pretending to be affronted, she put her hands on her hips and gave him a haughty stare. "I would suggest that you stop right there before I hit you, Horizon."

            "If I ever had any doubts, they are now dispelled," he replied solemnly, closing his jaw and dropping the slapstick routine. She grinned, hiding her surprise. Sneaky bastard, quite the consummate actor, huh? "But it's really strange to see you so grown up, you know." At her raised eyebrow and slightly impatient nod in the direction of the corridor, he raised two hands in defeat and began leading her towards Kingston's office. She already knew the way there, but it was only polite that she make some small talk… besides, she didn't know where Ragna was being kept. The locations of the containment cells was the secret that no Commander had ever entrusted to the Turks (or anyone else for that matter), for security reasons. Iridalan was most likely privy to that secret, the old codger, but he kept his secrets well. "You've grown, like, nearly a foot."

            "Heightwise, Horizon- heightwise only. Much to my annoyance." She shrugged expressively, pushing grimy black curls off her shoulder. "How about you? Is SOLDIER taking you well?"

            Zack blushed briefly. "I just joined, so I'm still a cadet, but I think I'm doing pretty good in my classes."

            "I didn't ask you how you were doing. I asked if you were enjoying yourself."

            He stared at her. "Dia, this is a job, not a playgroup!"

            Her eyebrow waggled humorously. "So long as you're here, why not have fun?- here we are, do you mind waiting outside?" Smiling, she waved him to one of the waiting chairs before turning back to the Commander's office. Her cheer vanished as she stepped across the threshold, the door sliding shut behind her. She'd always been a good liar, if she put her mind to it. "Kingston, sir." Her salute was offhanded and nowhere near the rigidly formal gesture that normal military organizations normally employed; Turks had very little use for such formalities. "I got your letter. Though I disagree with most of it."

            "Nice to see you too," the bald, coffee-skinned Corellian returned coolly, putting down the file he'd been going through. "I happen to value my own judgment. Piss off. And go see what you can do about Ragnarok. He'd be tearing the facility down if we didn't Mini and Silence him. Since it was contact with you that precipitated all this nonsense and the Shinra scientists are too busy with their other projects, I can only order you to get down there now. Zack's been given instructions. And a blindfold." This seemed important to him for a reason. Diera resisted the urge to remind him that she had a very accurate internal compass and a very good memory. Oh, well. At least there were no elevators on this compound- or none that she was aware of. 

            Still, for the principle of it, she crossed her arms. "Since when is Ragnarok any of _my_ personal concern? I didn't even touch him. All I did was question him, as is my right, granted by that little _agreement_ of ours. If you cared to examine the recordings which I can happily provide you with should you not have internal recordings of your own, there is nothing I say there which half the SOLDIER compound isn't discussing, sorry, _gossiping about_ anyway." _You want to shovel muck, fine. We'll do it together. _

            He unfolded to his feet like a well-oiled machine, all smooth dark chocolate muscle moving under the calico of his uniform. She stared defiantly at him, refusing to admit that he looked dangerous. Very dangerous. Diera didn't like backing down, and she was feeling snippy, especially with her personal crisis looming on the horizon. "Miss Raistlorne, or shall I say _Recruiter_, the fact remains that he broke down and started having fits _after_ your _one night stand_ and did you know that he screamed for you for hours before we silenced him?"

            She glowered, fingers curling. "For your information," the Turk gritted out, "it was a _cross-examination_, NOT a _one night stand_ as you so nicely put it, and I think you forgot to mention that last detail in your letter. Honestly, for someone of your station I hoped you'd be more thorough and less paranoid." Deciding to quit while the going was good, she turned on her heel, drawing the secondary gun (not the rank gun) she had on her, and proceeded to shoot the lock from the mechanical door. It opened, smoking slightly from its recent abuse, to reveal a very startled Zack, who jumped to his feet upon seeing her stalking towards him. "My business with Commander Kingston is finished," she said calmly, even frigidly, her tanned face stretched tight, "I'll come to discuss our mutual business when I feel better about you, sir. Horizon, I believe you have the blindfold and the directions?"

            Still looking baffled, he produced the length of thick white cloth, tied it firmly over her eyes, and spun her around a few times before leading her down to the Containment Area. She memorized the directions out of pure spite, upset and knowing that Kingston would be having a long talk with Uncle Iri, probably right at that moment. _Well, screw them, _she decided petulantly, concentrating on walking in an absolutely straight line. _Screw them all. Vincent could have done a better job, damn him. I wonder if the instructor in snarkiness is still around. I could use some lessons. Uncle Iri isn't going to teach me anything useful, the way he's going._

            No elevators, as befitting one of the oldest and best-fortified areas in SOLDIER architecture. She blinked in the twilight dimness of the basement, smoothing her hair as Zack pulled the blindfold away. It was only barely lighted, enough for a normal person to see the vaguest outline of things. Mako made it possible for her to see everything clearly, but without color. They really meant this to contain psychological cases, didn't they? "What's with the dim lights?"

            Zack looked around, found a guide rail, and began to follow it. Diera trailed behind him like a creaky, slender shadow. "The Commander said that this level is reserved for the trauma cases. They dim the lights to simulate night-time, because it's more soothing. There are lights in the cells if the patients want them, though…" He paused, uncertainly. "I don't know exactly. Seems like people would be more afraid of the dark. Personal demons and all that. But I guess they have their reasons."

            "Mmm," she hummed noncommittally, wondering where that metallic smell was coming from. It didn't smell like blood, really, but it wasn't the harsh tang of pure metal either. Salt rode the air, intangible but electric. Mako didn't just affect the reflexes- it heightened every sense. She walked in a world that pressed its sensory information upon her eagerly, while others never noticed the things she did. Few people realized that in her case, sight was not exactly primary. She didn't bother to explain. It was like explaining color to a monochrome world. Suffice to say, this place smelled strange. Sweat, yes, and death, only faintly. People had died here, quite some time ago. Considering that it took a lot to traumatize a SOLDIER- recognized even by other mercenary companies to be among the best in the world- she nodded sagely to herself, even though nobody would be able to see it in the near-darkness. You could keep sharp edges out of a room, but there were ways to kill oneself without physical trauma of any kind. Enough strong emotion could overload a system, poison it with its own chemicals, akin to the common belief that it was possible to will oneself dead. Some Turks were able to influence their objects strongly enough to produce such an effect, a skill that Diera was most definitely interested in learning. Unfortunately, she'd only managed to pick up Iridalan's vaunted Voice Of Command so far- inspiring such strong emotion was a distant hope for her. Oh, well. Make do. "How far back did you put Ragnarok?" She paused as a piping sound (sounding remarkably like a dying rat being slowly squashed to death, only with half-intelligible words mixed in) started up. "Is that what he sounds like now?" It was incongruously funny, but she didn't try to hide it, letting her grin show in her voice. She definitely saw Zack grin as he half-turned, one hand still on the rail, to fumble with the lock on the cell door. "Is he… liable to try and escape?" she wondered, looking dubiously at the hand he had on the door.

            "Not really. As of the moment, he's in a covered, reinforced fishtank, if you really wanted to know, and the Commander took the Silence off so you could speak with him." Her grimace, unseen, nevertheless escaped in a slight 'erk' sound. She did _not_ want to know. "The top is wire mesh, so he gets air, but not much else. Certainly he doesn't seem to need food and water. Take a good look at him when you go in. In the pink of health, I swear."

            Diera stepped quietly to his side and pulled him round to face her. His eyes fairly bulged at the sudden closeness of her violet eyes, which winked and flickered unevenly in the darkness, unmistakably glowing, even if they weren't exactly full-blown headlamps. "You've seen him?"

            "The commander- Commander Kingston- brought me down here this morning, to show me where to go. Switched the lights on. Said…" he looked away from her searching gaze. "Said that I had to know what I was bringing a friend to see. It was like watching a bug, Dia. Never mind he was raving at us, it was still like watching a crazy doll or something. The Commander looked at Ragna like he was something on the butterfly board." He shivered slightly, a totally un-macho gesture from an utterly male and faintly horse-faced young man. "If you don't mind, I'd like to stay outside."

            She gave him the Look for a few moments more, wondering if friendship would permit her to stretch him a little further, but decided against it. War should harden his stomach well enough. "Suit yourself. Go back up if you want to." He looked blindly back up at her, and she patted him simply on the shoulder. "I can see in the dark. The Amazing Glowing Eyes, see. Don't worry about me."

            His eyes flicked briefly to the line of Materia, their inner fire a dormant glow where her duster parted at the collar to reveal her leather vest and mesh chain choker- her own version of armor. In keeping with Uncle Iri's warning to come properly equipped, she had plundered the stores for the Master Magic and W-item spheres, not to mention a few other experimental materia that, if everything went well, would scarcely see the light of day. But Zackary, bless his trusting heart, didn't recognize the materia for the potentially lethal weapon that it was. Just an Esuna could put Kingston's precautions to bunk. But he trusted her. She watched him turn carefully around, hand still on the rail, and walk out like a silly sheep, and knew that she could do no worse than to betray that confidence. Kingston she would have cheerfully shot in the back. Zack inspired a… bond of sorts… in her. She mentally chided herself for being weak, resolving to deal with it later, and pushed the door open.

--

            He looked rather the worse for wear, if indeed in the pink of health, as Zack had put it. She closed the door behind her, cast a small Ice to lock it (a makeshift solution Lance had taught her in her 'primary development courses aka The Materia PlayFest) and dropped easily down into a Wutai sit-kneel position, facing Ragnarok. He had quieted, staring wildly at her like a cornered animal, bronze eyes glittering madly in the dim stillness of his cell. It was neither warm nor cold here, she noted idly, studying Ragnarok's temporary confinement. Apparently withholding food and drink also had the secondary effect of halting the excretory processes. No smell of anything worse than sweat, and the faint hint of blood. And if what she heard just now was anything to go by, it wouldn't have been surprising if _he_ was sweating blood too. 

            So- how to approach a cornered animal? Slowly, of course.

            She held out her hands, palm-up, and spoke gently- or as gently as her cracking voice (Jennings had her earmarked for alto, or even coloratura, as she matured) allowed. "Ragna, it's me. Dia. Do you know me?"

            There was a tense, unmoving silence, during which she held on to her hard-won patience and wondered if Kingston's diagnosis had been accurate. Then- mercy of mercies- he nodded. Some of the wild look had leaked away, and he was calm enough to sink down into a cross-legged sitting position, facing her. Still wild, still dangerous, but not so much that she couldn't easily squash him down. He didn't even twitch when she crawled over on her knees to lift the top of the miniature cell off, holding out her arm for him to catch. Once he was out, and they faced each other in the still-gloom, still able to see each other clearly, she touched a hand to her throat. "Esuna."

            Eyes narrowed to slits against the sudden thump of air shoved forcibly out of the way of a restored mass, she surveyed him critically. He hadn't grown any hint of a whisker or even a beard, not in the two days he'd been in confinement, as if his body had been frozen exactly in the prime of its appearance. Hmm. A side effect of the Mako? But she hadn't stopped growing… matured much faster than normal, in fact. Maybe it was the other substances Hojo had never been able to administer to her. Go for casual, then. "Hi, Ragnarok." 

            "Dia Valentine," he said faintly hoarsely, one hand going up to rub his throat. "I remember you."

            Odd turn of phrase. "Who am I?" she asked, hoping he would elaborate somewhat.

            "Specimen 00001a." His eyes filmed over, as if he was reciting something by memory. Did she look like that when she was running through her mental database? "Your testing was never completed. Hojo was angry about it." Blink blink, eyes clear again. "He still talks about you. You're the only female to survive the initial tests."

            "What else do you remember about me?"

            "You fought me. It was a draw." His brow furrowed slightly. "You tried to overturn my recommendation."

            "And how exactly did I set out to achieve that?" Her voice was positively frigid, if anything because she hadn't succeeded.

            "Investigated Hojo's work. Asserted that my memories were inaccurate." The frown smoothed. "You were wrong, of course. I have a perfect memory. It is unlikely that I would have lost the awareness of nearly twenty years of my life."

            As much as she would have liked to debunk that smug little smirk on his face, he'd resisted all her explaining before, so she moved on. Who says old dogs don't learn new tricks? "What happened after I left?"

            He cocked his head at her. "I remembered you. I had to tell you something. She told me…"

            "She?" Diera interrupted. "Who?"

            "I don't know. But She's there. Always there. Watching. Waiting. She told me that you were the Darkness, the Fear in the Night. Are you?"

            When in doubt, ad lib. "Maybe." And remember to move the ground to that which suits you. "What did she want you to tell me?"

            The aristocratic brow drew together again. "Not she. SHE. The One Who Drinks, the One Who Chooses, the She Who Is Fate. She's always there- always here- talking, whispering…" The frown melted away, and he shivered, rubbing one hand over his forearm as if he was cold. It wasn't cold, not in this cell. "She wants to talk to you, she says, not in your dreams but face to face. She says…" Abruptly his entire demeanor shifted. Diera jerked backwards, rearing from her seiza position like a startled bird, every muscle stiff with the effort it took to not up and run. The male face had smoothed almost into androgyny, shoulders falling back, hands trailing limply on the ground, yet he still kept upright, as if his head was attached by an invisible string to the ceiling. Bronze eyes fixed blankly onto hers, unfocused. 

            _Shit. Shit. SHIT._

            "Well, so you're their last weapon," the whispering, husky alto crawled from the depths of that baritone larynx, like a vent… ventriloquist? That was the word… a ventriloquist, throwing her voice into a puppet. The words, innocuous enough, climbed along her skin as if imbued with electricity, branding themselves upon her memory. "I didn't think you would be so… susceptible to my influence, not with the effort they put into making you."

            Diera threw her shoulders back, pulling the natural arrogance Vincent had taught her into a cloak, sinking into the familiar anger. "I'm my own person, woman," she said coldly, chin up. "If you've been watching me for as long as I think you have, you should know that."

            The woman's voice chuckled. It was totally unnerving to hear the feminine laugh come from a blank, expressionless male face, slack but for the movements of the lips and jaw. No salacious smirk twisted the smooth, slender lips, but the sound made up for every lack of physical expression. "Your own person! No, no, it's time for you to be truthful to yourself. Who are you? Diera Raistlorne, Dia Valentine. Raised by the Turks. Do you exist outside of the Turks? Find the answer, and I will talk with you anon."

            "So you're leaving Ragna to take his chances?" Diera inserted clinically, crossing her arms and willing herself not to throw up. Ragnarok had begun to, for lack of a better word, disintegrate. It was as if his molecular structure was breaking up… patches of his skin, his flesh, were shriveling, blackening, dissolving into motes of carbon, a process that looked agonizing, otherworldly. His navy SOLDIER uniform stayed unblemished on his wasting body, growing dustier with every passing breath. "How are you going to speak to me again, then?"

            "The same way I always have. Watch carefully, my dark child. See it to the end." Bronze eyes blinked, widened, the glow in them bursting uncontrollably into incandescent honey-amber fire, and he screamed, screamed, in horror and pain and loathing, shoulders spasming as he fell on his side, curling up into a fetal scrunch, staring at the dissolving bone of his exposed hands as they withered and fell away, ivory and marrow and muscle. 

            The woman was gone. The man was back. 

            Zack had gone back up. 

            There was nobody down here who would care. 

            And who in the world would keep surveillance on the place of madmen?

            In that one fatal moment, Diera knew what her next gesture would be.

            Ragnarok jerked, once, twice, as she pressed her Valken into his gut, fired, moved to his heart, fired, and finally drew away to blast his brain to shreds. 

            The screaming stopped.

She stared down the line of her sights at the bloody ruin she had made of his disintegrating body, empty and filled at the same time. The sting of blood in the room intensified and faded as even the spilt blood broke up into minute particles of black dust, gathering in piles and smears of powdery darkness on the immaculate floor. Only his empty, crumpled garments and the spent slugs of her mercy remained, glittering dully amid the uneven dust-hills that Shinra's science had created.

            Grateful for riding gloves, she knelt by Ragnarok's remains and gingerly picked out the slugs, gently brushing the dust off them. They fell into her belt pouch with a metallic tinkle, leaving no trace that she had been the secondary instrument of Ragnarok's death. She would report that his body degenerated to dust, and the truth would be hers alone. 

            Time enough to regret it, later. 

--

            "So, everything was just a result of the prototype process?" Kingston said slowly, fingers steepled. Diera stood before his table, at ease, hands by her sides and head raised in the casual posture of confident command. "Can you describe what you witnessed in minute detail? I assume that you were taught how to recall and report?"

            "Yes, I was," she replied, eyes impassive and trained on a point between his brows. "As you very well know." Years of training, piqued into the best performance she had ever given in nearly a decade of masquerading, made the words everything she needed it to be- lazy, only vaguely concerned, insouciant. Stress, she concluded, made her mind even sharper. If she could pull off an act as adult as _this_ without collapsing halfway in laughter… well, it was a mixed blessing, considering the circumstances. "Has Iridalan told you what my responsibilities concerning the placements of my people are?"

            He met her raptorial look without flinching. "I'm surprised he hasn't told you beforehand."

            "Iridalan, for his own reasons, keeps a lot of things to himself," she said, masking her annoyance with a faint smile. "Humor me."

            The instructions were fairly simple. Take a census, note people who had jobs on hiatus, and generally coordinate the placements of their people on the field (owned by SOLDIER, adjoining the barracks, and currently adorned with large tents like orderly trapezial mushrooms after a spring rain). Zack, as agreed, would chaperone- he'd stand in as her SOLDIER liason for the duration of the inter-company conference. Diera had raised her eyebrows, but privately she thought that Zack had the sense of a trained Turk and so she didn't protest that Kingston was keeping his more experienced lieutenants back. What was that they said about generals and infantry? Stilettos and clubs, that was the metaphor. The Turks were a veritable assassin's complement. She allowed one corner of her mouth to curl in brief, sardonic amusement at the thought; people often said that an army of too many generals would never win, but the Turks seemed to have no such problems. Well, not that there wasn't constant internal friction, but they eventually almost always ended up getting whatever needed to be done, done. 

            Fortunately, Kingston seemed inclined to dismiss her after his brief, but self-explanatory, listing. She flicked him a slightly rude salute and ducked out, heading for the open and somewhere she could climb up a wall. Time to check out this place on her own. 

--

            "We have to work on your getting _down_ from those heights," Silk told her tiredly, as she nursed a cracked forearm. It was already knitting at a furious pace, but Jennings had refused her any painkillers (probably to teach her a lesson, the old codger), thus ensuring that she would have to deal with the pain for a day or so. She had thereafter been shooed off to one of the command tents (maybe half again the size of a normal three-person tent and easily recognizable) to process all the lists that she was expected to go through.

            Masks down and head beginning to ache dully as she fed it sheets of data, Diera grumbled. It hadn't really been any fault of hers. How was she to know that that patch of grass was just a covering for bedrock? She had simply jumped down with the full intention to do a simple tuck-and-roll from the intimidating height of fifteen or so meters, never mind that it would look incredibly ungraceful, it had always worked for her before. The resultant impact had fractured her left arm, gashed _both _arms wide open, and given her a nasty concussion. Silk, still limping somewhat arthritically, had been entrusted with the task of assisting his partner back to the tent and making sure that she kept her mind on her work. He had made sure to grumble loudly and at length about all the cute medic chicks he was missing out on. She had been too much in pain and embarrassed to kick his ass there and then. She wasn't sure she was up to it even now. _Damn._

            Her ears felt mashed with cotton wool- so many people walking, talking, shouting outside! Mako stenciled each distinct noise into sharp relief, all the information meshing into a hazy bundle of prickly white noise. Her nose was protesting at the stink of primary human habitation, and the taste of sweat, chocobo and metal clung to her tonsils. Urk! And still her eyes printed every scrap of the words under her hands into the stone of her memories. Let Vincent say what he wanted, but he'd done his job well, suiting her perfectly to her job. Suddenly she laid the lists down, unable to concentrate enough to make sense of them immediately. 

            Vincent. _Where is he?_

            She'd begun to suspect, watching her mentors guard the Shinra scientists… Kamryn and Hojo… Kamryn and Vincent… Vincent and Hojo. Only Hojo had remained in the wake of their sordid little affair. Where had Kamryn and Vincent gone? Hojo, for all his sliminess, had… something, something real, going with Kamryn. Diera had often thought that it was a little like herself and Vincent, only a little. The rest had to be a sample of that curious, inadequate emotion that many of her uncles and aunts denounced: _love_. Whatever it was, for the same reason that Vincent had never yet killed her, Hojo could not have killed Kamryn. Besides, she had been pregnant, so hugely so that it must have been twins, and Hojo had been so excited that she was donating the babies to his project, which had made Vincent _so_ angry and precipitated a fight with Kamryn… Hojo wouldn't endanger his girlfriend. Vincent she could believe, but both of them? Unlikely.

            Wait. _Twins._ _Ragnarok and his doppelganger. _Her own accelerated maturity. It made a horrible sort of sense. She had only stayed around for two small doses of the Mako, and already she had put in nearly double her growth since. What about a larger dose? Enough to accelerate the growth to twenty-five years' worth in three years, maybe two? And then he could have administered something to freeze their appearances. Certainly she'd left him for long enough for him to have moved on without her. Although Gast had been the main brains behind the outfit, Hojo was perfectly capable of his own advancements… and he didn't have the scruples that had hindered Gast before. It was a worrying realization, and once again (for about the three hundredth and sixty-fourth time) she resolved never to allow herself to be alone, without allies, in his presence, ever again. With that in mind, she got up from her folding chair and began to pace the inner perimeter of her assigned confines. Where could Vincent and Kamryn have disappeared off to? It wasn't like Vincent to do anything like that without sending some kind of word to Iridalan. And Lance, too- he was usually the voice of reason to Vincent's habitual implacability. But he was also the less dominant half of their partnership, she remembered ruefully, folding her hands behind her back and wincing as healing flesh (and bone) protested (but she did it anyway). 

            Whatever had happened to the three of them, Hojo had to be up to the eyebrows in it. 

            Deep in thought, she nearly crashed into Iridalan, who had stepped through the tent entrance a heartbeat before her foot came down on the left edge of the flap. The rustle of canvas warned her just in time; she hastily moved her foot in the opposite direction and neatly backed up as he came through. Startled, she stared at him, nearly eye-to-eye with her, and backed up some more. Anyone else she might have expected, but not him, not so soon. "You!" she exclaimed, taken aback. "Weren't you in Wutai somewhere?" She knew the comment was silly even as she said it, and contrived to modulate it into sarcasm, crossing her arms. "Were you on a gold bird or something?"

            "Astute as recently," he jibed back, obviously not in the mood to be pandered to. "I'm glad to see that all those years have finally paid off. And you seem to be growing up, too, that's a bonus. Have you completed the lists?" Without waiting for an answer, he dropped himself onto the seat she had vacated, leaving her to stand. She turned to face the table, letting her sore arms fall by her sides, obedient to this man's authority if nothing else. After years to watching people jump to attention at his command, she tended to follow suit even if her primary instinct was to slap him silly. So she nodded and started to point to the very last page, where she had not yet finished looking through the list, but he was already moving on to another topic. "Do you know where the Neutral Lands are?"

            Diera blinked. What a silly question! "Of course. It's the plains beside Kalm Town. Undisputed territory conceded for the purpose of mediating international disputes, upheld by most of the mercenary and espionage companies in the world… do you want the complete history?"

            "No, that understanding is acceptable." Leaning back in the chair, he looked to at her. "The Turks are also part of the truce, as is SOLDIER. It has come to our attention that a group of radicals have staked their claim on about two hundred acres of land nearest to the mountain ridge curve. Your next mission is to leave immediately for this area with a fifty-person detachment of second-class SOLDIERs, reclaim the area under international truce and capture as many of the radicals as you can." The steely grey eyes indicated that there would be hell to pay when the poor sods were brought before him in the interrogation procedures. Iridalan disliked trouble in the best of times. With Wutai and Shinra looming on the horizon, he was definitely not in the best of moods- or situations. "Failure is not an option. But I suppose you already know that." The message, unspoken, was nevertheless clear: _get this done, or die trying._ Now she realized, with dull resignation, why he had told her to bring materia and arm herself. 

            All the knowledge in the world didn't change the fact that she had to do it, though.

            "Yes sir." Nodding a brief, perfunctionary salute to him, she left the tent, heading for the nearest weapons cache. If she was going to fight her first real battle, it wouldn't be with anything less than a sub-machine gun and several rounds on hand. 

--

            Zack wasn't in the mounted detachment that went with her. She hadn't expected him to, but it was just a little bit disappointing. Having him around would have made controlling a large group of disgruntled men easier to manage. They were, justifiably, doubtful of her ability to lead, and she was even more dubious than they were of her own ability to present without having to shoot someone in a non-lethal area first. 

            _Go for broke then-_ she looked around, considering presentation positions, and decided that no elevation was necessary. Pulling one riding glove off, she whistled, a shrill, jay-like noise that cut through the irritated murmur. She got nearly instant attention, to a man, although some of them looked as if they were considering an appeal to Kingston. 

            "Look," she said loudly, clearly. "I'd rather not be doing this either, I know I'm young. You've every right to be annoyed. But we need to get the job done, and that means no sass, no splits in the ranks. Among you, you know who's best in leading; I want five teams of ten, leaders report to me, and you have ten minutes." They burst into frenetic activity, jostling to find amiable comrades, and arguing briefly over who was to lead. Diera busied herself with checking and rechecking the data she had gotten from the scouts who had gotten news of the radicals back to the Turks. There were quite a few ways to attack, really, since the fanatics seemed to have very little real idea of how accessible their chosen ground was from the mountain itself, especially with the black Chocobos that she had commandeered. If all went well, the fighting would be over in a day or so. Politely saluting the self-appointed team leaders who guided their mounts toward her, she listed their position, knowing very well that they knew the place better than she (SOLDIER, like the rest of the major merc companies, patrolled the Neutral Lands in shifts) and struck with the sudden thought that one of them, one of the companies, must have let the radicals in willingly. It was confusing. She was trained in such intricate stratagems, but all the cloak-and-dagger tactics gave her a headache. Worry about it later. "I have a plan, but I want your suggestions first."

            They gave her thoughtful looks, then looked at each other, and one of them grinned. "Nice to see we're getting somewhere," he remarked cryptically, and they bent their heads together for some earnest strategizing. All her peers were older men, which she was used to dealing with anyway, and once they realized that she was not about to subject them to some idealistic head-on last stand, things warmed up considerably. Diera knew her capabilities lay in the strategy of things, not the physical side, and they agreed, on the condition that she kept the sub handy and covered their backs. She _did_ correlate their plans nicely, anyway, so the concession to her data procession ability was made and they split up, six of the teams fanning out to flank the disputed territory from the sea front, and the remaining four heading directly for the opponent- to create a big diversion. 

            Each team had a PHS in case of emergency plan changes, and it was a good thing, because Diera realized early on that there were a LOT more of the opponents around than the scouts had originally reported. At least a hundred or two more than before, in fact. They were getting in from _somewhere_, but where? And she needed reinforcements, not the paltry fifty that had been sent along with her. They were outnumbered by nearly four to one. Maybe more, if there were others waiting in the mountains that the disputed territory bordered on. Her first call was to the four diversionary units, who had not yet sprung the bait, telling them to desist and stay down for a while until she figured out what else to do. The second was to Iridalan's mobile PHS, starting off with an aggrieved "What the hell do you expect me to do!" and carrying on in that vein for several minutes. Suffice to say, he pointed out (managing to insert his assertions between her annoyed hisses) that it was not impossible to carry off what she had been sent out to do, considering that she had studied sneak tactics for all of her sentinent life, and no, she was not getting a person more than she had already. She hung up on him just about then, disgruntled and despairing, to try and think of a suitably dishonorable way of winning without too many casualties.

            Strangely, the more she thought about it, the easier it seemed, because the Turks had just done another mass-kill job recently… La Contresiera.

            _If your numbers are small, obstruct your opponents' movements. Pick them off with poison-_

            Problem: Where to get enough poison to handicap them enough? And how to administer it?

            Answer: Most local plants had more poison than many apothecaries stocked. And one of her childhood bedtime books (how long ago had _that_ been?) had been _Most Potent Poisons: Assassination By Ornamentals_. No problem there. And they had to have some kind of a common water supply; carrying crates of individually-packed water bottles would be a gross waste of resources. Giving the order to 'stay down', she slipped out alone, on foot, trusting to sun and shadow to disguise her from watchers. 

            Later, she would wonder if even that, too, had been part of Shinra's orchestrations.

-------------

A/N: All right, I went back to re-read this thing and my reaction was exactly the same as the first time: URK. I think I need a beta, but who in the world would be prepared to put up with this monster? (gloom) If anyone would be kind enough to beta, anyone at all… drop me a review line, ok? It would be really, really, really, really appreciated. And here's the carrot: if I get a beta, then this monster will get revamped faster, and everyone would have better things to read! ….or at least that's what it feels like. (glooooom)


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